Revenge of the Wizard
by Darth Marrs
Summary: A Harry Potter cursed with immortality must not only survive the raping of Earth by monsters far more powerful than any humanity has encountered, but he must rise to save it, and in the process exact one wizard's revenge against the Galactic Empire.
1. Welcome to Despayre

**Revenge of the Wizard**

A Fanfic by Darth Marrs,

Author's Notes: This story began as a direct sequel to Harry Potter and the Four Founders. I wrote it simultaneously with Forever Mage, and when it stalled initially Forever Mage won out. This story stalled because of the bond and harem requirements that carried over from Four Founders. It bogged the story down so badly that I just gave up. Years later, I revisited this, removed all reference to either bonds or harems, and moved the time frames around to create a whole new story. Like Broken Chains, it is another HP/SW crossover. However, it is in many ways the complete opposite. Where Broken Chains was a SW-trained Harry in the HP verse, this one will be an HP-trained Harry in the SW verse. No soul bonds, no lemons, no harems. And no, I don't own either of the properties.

Additional Note: When I started this, the Master of Death Harry was not yet a cliché. Now it is. So, be warned I use that cliché. It grants Harry a long life, but he is not super-powerful by any means, nor will he always win his battles. I hope you enjoy.

_The Wrath of Peleus' Son, the direful Spring_

_Of all the Grecian Woes, O Goddess, sing!_

_That Wrath which hurl'd to Pluto's gloomy Reign_

_The Souls of mighty Chiefs untimely slain;_

_Whose Limbs unbury'd on the naked Shore_

_Devouring Dogs and hungry Vultures tore._

_Since Great Achielles and Atrides strove,_

_Such was the Sov'reign Doom, and such the will of Jove._

Homer's Iliad, by Alexander Pope

**Chapter One: Living in Despayre**

"_Tell us the story again, Daddy!" Lily asked._

Slave Terran-2448DZ opened his eyes as the grating claxon rang through the hot, stuffy air. The first thing he saw, just like every other morning of his enslavement, was the crisscrossed metal bars supporting the cot directly above him. Already a pair of heavily calloused feet was swinging over the side in response to the bitter wake-up call. When he also sat up, he glanced across the length of the cavernous metal room at twenty rows of cots stacked twenty levels high and twenty cots deep. In all them, other people were waking up. They were all naked—the room was filled with a sea of stacked flesh comprised of eight thousand people who once had hope, but now had nothing—not even the dignity of clothing.

When he stood, he could feel the whole structure vibrating under the combined weight of so many people all moving at once. The woman in front of him avoided his gaze and instead looked down at her feet, as nude as he was. She was the fourth to inhabit the cot next to him in the months since they'd been there; all the others died either of disease, accident or execution. She was perhaps nineteen or twenty and thin, with a pinched, stressed face. Her lank hair had been cut short, like the rest of them.

Unlike the others, Slave Terran-2448DZ's hair grew back the very next day every time until it was the previous length, and then stopped growing. However, there were too many other slaves for their masters to care about that one strange aberration. It was a long wait, staring at the poor girl's bare backside, while ahead of them the other slaves started climbing down the stairs.

The moment they reached the ground level, their overseers force-marched them into two groups—men in one and women in the other, to their new day. The day began with a march into a long room lined with a sunken, latrine-like toilet of running water on either side. This was one of only two bathroom breaks they had—people learned either to hold it, or mess themselves over the course of the day.

He squatted down like the rest to relieve himself, no longer even conscious of the mass of sweating, stinking men around him doing the same. He had a name once, of course. All those around him did. But to their new, brutal masters, names carried persona, history and respect, and so no names were used, ever. To ensure he never forgot that, his slave name was branded into the flesh of his left forearm, just like all the others.

When they relieved themselves without the benefit of toilet paper, they were marched into the second part of their routine. He closed his eyes and held his breath as tepid water smelling and tasting of bitter chemicals shot up from the floor, down from the ceiling and out from the sides of the narrow passage. They did not stand in it, though. Rather, the column of slaves marched through it, with their motion serving as the means by which the spray reached everything.

Slave Terran-2448DZ took the opportunity to wipe his body with his hands in an effort to get himself as clean as he could. Those around him who had not given up all hope did the same. The last few feet the water switched to hot, dry air that blew away the moisture, leaving them mostly clean and dry. After that waited rows and rows of plain, unremarkable orange single-piece jumpsuits, one-size fits all.

He got dressed with the others and followed as they were then marched by their overseers into the mess-hall. The food was a gelatinous, foul-tasting goo, but surprisingly they were given a lot of it. Granted, they were only fed twice daily, but the meals were substantial enough that Slave Terran-2448DZ did not suffer too badly. While their overseers were cruel and inhumane, they were also dreadfully efficient. Underfed slaves did not produce as much, and so all slaves were fed.

Ten minutes to eat, and then they were once again marching out of their dormitory. The air outside the gigantic metal cube tasted bitter, hot and dry. The sky above was more purple than blue, and as far as he could look, the slave saw only wasteland. It was not a desert, for a desert implied natural forces and ecology in action. No, what they emerged into was the ravaged, violated surface of a once verdant world raped of all resources.

Large, hovering sleds waited to take them hundreds of clicks to where they would work the day away. Overhead, dominating the horizon, was their ultimate project—a man-made moon stretching it's skeletal infrastructure from the horizon to the centre of the sky, staring down ominously with one great, hollow eye.

"Welcome to Despayre," Slave Terran-2448DZ, formerly known as Harry Potter, whispered to himself as he looked up at the Death Star.

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

When Harry saw his first Wookiee, the word 'Sasquatch' came to mind. Until that moment, their only encounters with the aliens who invaded Earth were with the humanoid-shaped creatures in white armour, with their vicious blasters that could stun or kill with equal ease. But the Wookiees were something new and fascinating, like a giant, bipedal golden retriever or Labrador dog that could bark, whistle and growl in a way that evidently was a language.

Their particular overseer was a seven-foot tall female named Shewtalla. Her fur hung in golden brown clumps from her body, and she carried the smell of a very large wet dog. Harry suspected she was given no more time to groom in the morning than they were.

He only knew she was female because of a pair of pink nipples that were barely visible through the fur on her chest. She did not have breasts as such, but from the way the other Wookiees treated her, those pink nipples seemed to be something her people respected. Few of the other Wookiees had them, though many others were referred to as female. Harry could only guess that she had had young at some point. It made him wonder where her young were.

The alien invaders did not speak any language Harry had ever heard of, despite having learned a dozen over his years as both an Auror and as an Enforcer with the International Confederation of Wizards. In fact, he could lift a language right from someone's mind using a Legilimency technique he learned from a magical linguistics professor from the Escola Nacional de Magia in Brazil.

And so, on that first day on Despayre, as terrified humans were lined up and tagged like herd animals, Harry risked looking into a Wookiee's eyes and drew their language out. For meeting an overseer's gaze, he was rewarded with a backhanded blow that knocked him off his feet. He'd timed his efforts so the white-armoured soldiers would not be there, otherwise he would have been shot.

Instead, he took the blow and staggered back into line. "That was stupid, mate," someone whispered behind him.

Harry, with a completely alien language swishing through his brain, could only nod. "Yeah"

Now, months later, he had picked up just a smattering of Galactic Basic, as the alien overseers called their language. But it was Shewtalla the Wookiee who communicated most of their orders, and for that she used a silver robot who somehow spoke every Earth language. Most of the slaves in Harry's group appeared to be European, though. It made sense that slaves were clumped according to their region of capture. He had no doubt another grouping had North Americans, Africans, Asians or Polynesians and Australians.

A pair of soldiers, called, 'Stormtroopers', like Hitler's crack forces, accompanied Shewtalla as always. They were not just there to guard the slaves, he learned soon enough, but to guard her as well. The Wookiees themselves were slaves, but because of their greater strength and technical knowledge, those not working directly on the station were established as overseers to the less advanced, primitive humans recently acquired from Earth to do the more mindless tasks.

The moment the transports came to a halt, she started snarling and growling at them, and as always the silver protocol droid that accompanied her translated instructions. It was the same as always—most of the slaves worked in the assembly area at the back of the massive refinery droids that were constantly eating the planet, while the larger, stronger men would ride on the outside of the droid itself to clear the droids of native animal life that might either attack the droids, or otherwise interfere with them. It was at once boring and deadly work, and over the past few months Harry had seen at least a hundred men die in various, disgusting ways. It became so common it did not even elicit comment from the other slaves any more. Life here was worthless.

He fell in line with the rest, once more assigned to duty outside. Around them, he listened to the pained death throes of a planet.

Despayre was a primitive world compared to Earth—its entire landmass was made up of a single super continent, with clumps of hyper-forests made up of trees grown so thickly together a man would be hard pressed to pass through them. The landmass was surrounded by vast oceans that teemed with life. It was not truly a mineral rich planet, but that didn't matter. It also had magic—a magic that tasted completely alien to Earth's, and yet similar in its own way. The ley lines that on earth were a perfect grid covering the planet were here crazily interlaced with little recognizable pattern. Harry speculated it was because of the uneven distribution of the land masses.

The Galactic Empire ate the planet anyway. Harry knew that the goo the slaves ate each morning came from droid ships that trolled the seas for every iota of life, while on land, refinery droids the size of skyscrapers ate the land like caterpillars consuming a tree. The droids themselves looked like something from a Pink Floyd video: massive metal mouths on treads as wide as a football field, and wheels within the treads as tall as Big Ben.

Deep inside each mouth burned a furnace of unbelievable power, so hot that it broke down all matter the droids consumed on an atomic level, and then reassembled it into something entirely different. The mouth dug down twenty feet below the surface and another hundred feet above it, and literally swallowed everything in front of it, from soil to trees and animals, plus the occasionally unlucky or suicidal slave.

The newly created material was gathered on the assembly lines by the majority of slaves and moved to the hover sleds, which ran non-stop between the droids and the Imperial base they slept in at night, and then transported back to the base where they were placed on a space elevator and lifted to the massive body that orbited the planet. The very atomic reaction used to break the raw material down was itself the source of energy the droids used to power themselves. Harry knew that his group of slaves worked only during the day, and that another entire dormitory of slaves worked the night shift. The droids never stopped working.

The technology to create such mechanical beasts was beyond belief. That such technology was accompanied by such a disregard for life robbed Harry of any hope that things would ever get better. Not that he had any hope left. Harry should have felt rage and indignation. He should have used his power to kill as many of the damned Imperials as he could before they killed him. He should have—and sometimes at night he imagined going on a rampage. But then the numbness which had followed him from earth crept back into his thoughts, and he asked "What good would it do?"

None. It would not do any good at all. It would not bring his family back to him, and so why bother? Numb and broken, Harry continued to survive somehow, going through the motions of slavery without thought or emotion.

Out of habit, Harry glanced up and saw the station as soon as he reached his post. The station was already more than half complete, with strange pie-shaped striations still missing from the superstructure. All in all, though, it was huge, like some terrible god floating just over the horizon. When he looked at the station in the sky, he felt Death glaring down at him like a long-lost friend.

The trick to staying alive as a slave was not to be noticed. Harry's assigned duty, along with another two hundred men for his side of the droid, was to clear the occasional debris from the intake vents along the side of the droid. This required him to scramble along a narrow plank of metal some hundred and fifty feet off the ground while the droid continued running and sucking in air to catalyse the nuclear furnace within. It was hot, hard work as the initial consumption of raw materials sent debris flying everywhere. More often than not, he had to duck pieces of tree or rock. Once he had to duck a flysker rat the size of a horse.

That particular morning was hotter than normal, and very dusty. The droids had already consumed an area of several thousand square miles, and their commute to the edge of the now desolate patch of land took a little longer every day. Harry rode in silence, pressed against on all sides by other slaves packed so tightly into the sled they stood without the need for rails. Breathing became difficult sometimes, but they survived.

So close together, it was inevitable that he make eye-contact with those around him. The men who survived this long were strong to begin with—men who had a hardness or instinct that let them continue where most others would fail. They met his gaze without hint of recognition, lost in their own thoughts just as Harry himself was.

Through the heads and shoulders of those around him, Harry looked out over the flat plain that marked the refinery droid's path. There were no hills or topography of any kind—the droids ate whole mountains. If they ever reached the end of the continent, they would turn around and eat into the soil even deeper. Just in the months since Harry had been there, the air seemed harder to breathe as the Empire wiped out all oxygen-producing plant life, while the sun burned ever hotter with the death of the biosphere. What rain there was came violently and quick and the water ran off with no topsoil or vegetation to catch it.

Finally, in the far distance, Harry saw a thin line of green that grew steadily larger as they approached, until they were able to see the line of trees that marked the native forest. Far in the distance, like smoke, Harry could make out the peaks of distant mountains that would, within the year, be blasted into piles of rock for the droids to eat.

The sleds arrived at the five droids that were driving along the edge of the forest at just a few miles every hour. The droids were evenly spaced along a swath of land a hundred miles long, and would eat fifty miles in one direction each, before turning all at the same time to bite deeper into the forest to begin again.

As the sleds split up to take the slaves to their assigned droids, Harry could see the night shift workers wearily climbing out of the slowly moving droid, making their way onto the arid rock that was all the droids left behind. The shift change went quickly—Harry had only the most fleeting of glances at the night shift slaves, who all appeared to be more ethnically diverse than his group.

Then he and those assigned the most dangerous tasks were climbing the ladders to the forest-side of the droid for the remainder of the day. It was hard, difficult work, and Harry did not think twice about using magic to aid himself. Normally heavy pieces of wood managed to slip and fly off the side easier for him than for the others, who had to work together to lift off the debris.

When the droid upset a nest of flits, Harry shielded himself from the massive flying reptiles but was unable to help a fellow slave down the ramp who was struck by one of the creature's poisonous barbs. He began to convulse and fell over the side within minutes. There was no point in trying to help since the Imperials would not provide any medicine to treat him.

No one spoke about his passing; the day continued as normal. Unfortunately, normal included storms.

The consequence of having a single, super-ocean was the development of massive storms the size of continents on Earth. These storms slammed into the supercontinent and disrupted huge amounts of air. As the wind picked up energy, it also picked up dust and sand from the ravaged portion of its interior.

Harry was not the first to see the storm. But when the other slaves pointed and shouted a warning, he was not surprised to see a near black wall of dust and sand bearing down at them at almost a hundred miles an hour. "Grab a hold of the rails!" he shouted, echoing the other shouts up and down the gangplank. Every slave there had been through at least one storm already and so knew what to do.

Like the others, Harry grabbed a hold of the gangplank with both arms, hugging the hot metal to his chest even as he wrapped his legs around it. The storm came faster and faster. At the last moment, when the storm blocked out Despayre's sun, he cast a bubblehead charm on himself wandlessly. Then the storm hit.

It felt as if a troll had kicked him. The wall of dirt and wind hit all at once, saturating every part of his body except his nose and mouth. He squeezed his eyes shut and held on for dear life as the wind roared around him. It felt as if his skin were being flayed, but there was nothing he could do but hold on until it passed.

Just as quick as the storm came, it left, spilling its tons of sand and dust over the forest before the trees and vegetation broke it up. The whole droid rumbled under them, rougher and louder than normal. Harry blinked opened dust-caked eyes and saw that at least another five slaves had been swept off the edge of the droid, but that didn't concern him.

Something was wrong with the droid. He looked up at the intake vents and saw they were coated in dirt. Desperately, he rushed from his position and stuck his fingers against the packed dirt in each vent slit. Try as he might, he could not make the dirt move. Down the gangplank, the other slaves were still recovering and not paying attention, so Harry stepped back and cast a blasting curse at the vent. The metal did not bend at all, but some of the dirt broke off in cakes almost as solid as rock. Three more casts had only minimal effect—the vent was as large as a London metro bus, and for all his efforts he had only cleared a foot of one of fifty slits running up the length of the vent.

The droid below them began to wine in a high-pitched tone he had never heard before. The whine was followed by a new vibration in the decking under their feet. "What's that?" one of the other slaves called.

Harry knew, though. The vents were now clogged; the droid was not pulling in oxygen. He thought it would shut down, but instead it kept rolling forward, consuming everything in front of it even though it could not breathe. Something was dreadfully wrong.

Harry knew it meant his life to leave his post, but on the other hand, he believed with every pore of his body that it would mean his life if he did nothing. So, without a second's hesitation, he tore down the gangplank to the nearest ladder. Instead of going down, though, he climbed up into the area forbidden to Terran slaves—the command deck of the droid.

The top level of the droid was spacious and lined in windows made of a material stronger than the strongest materials Earth knew about. He ran to the nearest door, which was locked. The lock came undone with a simple charm and allowed him entrance.

He entered into a room of chaos. Wookiees were growling and barking at droids, while in the corner one of the Imperial overseers was shouting at everyone. His uniform was black and normally would have been topped off with an insect-like black helmet. However, he had his helmet off to reveal a young, perfectly human face flushed with fear and stress.

Harry stood frozen in shock as realization sank into him: their masters were human. He had tried for months to understand what kind of alien monsters would do what they did, and speculated on something reptilian or insectoid. But this…this was just a man with pale skin and brown eyes, as if he were from Hamburg or Vienna.

As the shock passed, Harry realized the Wookiees were shouting at the human-sized droids to override the Refinery Droid brain to do a quick stop before the reactor went critical. Unfortunately, the droids did not have the dexterity to do what was required, being mostly protocol droids. The human was shouting his language at the Wookiees, who responded via their droids that their hands were too big to fit into the emergency access ports.

Their masters were human. The creatures that killed his family were human. Just … human…

Trembling with rage, Harry rushed across the command deck, startling Wookiees and droids alike. The human saw him coming and shouted at him in his language even while he pulled his weapon. Harry pushed the blaster aside, grabbed the suddenly terrified Imperial by his forehead, and ripped into the man's mind with abandon.

When Harry returned to his own mind, the gibbering officer collapsed to the deck and began to convulse. Harry stood perfectly still as he incorporated Basic into his thoughts. Around him, all the Wookiees had gone perfectly still, watching him intently. They knew he had just signed his own death warrant by assaulting an Imperial.

At that moment, as the young officer's entire life flashed before Harry's mind, he did not care. Stumbling, he moved toward the emergency access point within the droid and pushed one of the stumbling, clumsy robots aside before crawling into the tight space. He understood then why no Wookiee would have been able to fit.

He cast the technomage spell he learned as an enforcer with the International Confederation of Wizards on Earth. He learned the spell when he was in his twenties because of the increased incidents of technically-based magic being used on Muggles. Young witches and wizards, often Muggleborn themselves, often struck back at childhood Muggle tormentors by sending cursed emails or putting jinxes on computers. All his friends were as surprised as he was at how skilled he became with the magic. Hermione even called him a nerd in training once.

Shewtalla and several other Wookiees gathered around the outside of the access port, growling at each other in their intricate, ancient language. Harry did his best to ignore them as his magic showed him what the problem was. He saw immediately that there was no way to fix the problem from where he was. Instead, he realized he would have to simply shut the unit down. The problem was that the decrepit, limited droid brain had been going non-stop for so long it could no longer deactivate itself just on a verbal or button-based control.

Harry's fingers moved nimbly over the controls of the emergency droid interface as he literally programmed in a new command code that would allow the great machine to finally rest, guided by a magic spell designed by an American Muggle-born wizard who opted to go to MIT right after Miskatonic.

The world fell away as Harry concentrated on the board. The magic did not actually manipulate the machinery—rather it presented him with a mental map of what he needed to do to accomplish his goal, up to and including what commands to enter, what controls to use and exactly how to do it.

He lost all awareness of the world around him as the requirements of the magic began to tax him. The technology was tens of thousands of years more advanced than anything on Earth, and even the magic itself strained to unlock its secrets. Harry pushed more magic and concentration into the spell and continued on. The whine grew louder and the whole refinery began to vibrate so strongly the sound of it rattled his brain.

Harry's fingers virtually flew now over the emergency access panel as he manually forced the code to overwrite the droid brain's impulse to keep going. Then, with the push of the last key, the code pushed through and the refinery came to a stop for the first time since it landed on Despayre decades ago.

Harry leaned back against the cold confines of the emergency access passage and sighed. He realized abruptly that he had been sweating, because it made the dust form the storm into a muddy concrete on his skin. He crawled back out and found himself surrounded by Wookiees.

"_Your life is forfeit, small one,"_ Shewtalla said.

"Not if I can help it," Harry said, surprising the Wookiees with his understanding. "They burned my world and killed my family. I thought they were monsters—none of us knew they were only human."

"_Humans _are_ monsters,_" another of the Wookiees Harry did not know said.

"But they're monsters I can fight," Harry said. He looked around at the six Wookiees, the shortest of whom topped him by a foot at least. "If I can keep the overseer from reporting me, will you betray me?"

"_You saved our lives, small one,_" Shewtalla said. "_We will not act against you._"

The others around her all nodded in agreement. With a smile to them, Harry crossed the spacious command deck to lean down next to the officer. His name was Daroon Holdig, and he was a lieutenant junior grade in the Imperial Navy who barely graduated from the Imperial Academy at Corulag. He was assigned as the overseer of the refinery droid not because of his dependability, but because his superior officers considered him a failure.

During his one year rotation planet-side, he had personally killed twelve slaves and violated two of them. He kept those trysts secret not because he was ashamed of his actions, but because he was ashamed to have rutted with females of such a primitive race.

Harry stood, placed a hand on his own chest, and performed a cleansing charm for the first time since his enslavement. The caked dust fell away from his body in a cloud. He then performed a switching spell with the Imperial. In a second he wore the man's black uniform, while the Imperial wore his jumpsuit. Behind him, the Wookiees snorted and barked to each other.

"_Are you Jedi_?" Shewtalla finally asked.

"No," he said. "I'm a wizard."

He cast a feather-light charm on the officer, threw him over his shoulder, and then left the command centre to walk onto the very top of the droid. He continued walking until he reached the steep slope that ran down to the massive metal teeth that had fallen still.

"For Ginny," he whispered as he tossed the brain-addled Imperial into the still burning maw of the droid.

He returned to the command deck and used Holdig's ID to regain entry. None of the Wookiees had moved. Ignoring them, he delved into Holdig's memories to access a channel to the shift commander on Refinery 3, even while casting a minor glamour on himself to resemble the now dead officer.

A hologram of the short, ugly fat man appeared in front of Harry when he sat down. "Lieutenant, why has your droid stopped?"

"Captain Markus, we had a potential reactor situation," Harry said with false bravado. "I was able to manually override the system to bring it to a stop. At first glance, I believe the intake vents are completely blocked. We will need to remove the exterior plates and do a thorough cleaning. Sir, I feel strongly we should do this for all the droids."

Markus stared at him, and then snorted. "Leave the thinking for those with brains, boy. Get your droid operational. You have ten minutes."

The hologram faded, as did Harry's glamour. "Shewtalla, do you think you can get the plates off and scrubbers working in ten minutes?"

"_We shall try, Small One!"_


	2. A Life Not His Own

A/N: So, I decided not to take the week off after all. So, here's the next chapter. Like all of my stories, there is pacing involved, so don't get upset if you don't get all the answers to everything all at once. This is a long, and hopefully entertaining,read. Also, I've created a new forum for reviews. Responses to Chap 1s reviews can be found there. Thanks for reading.

* * *

><p><span><strong>Chapter Two: A Life Not His Own<strong>

"_Tell us the story again, Daddy!" Lily asked._

Harry blinked awake instantly as his daughter's voice echoed in his dreams. He sat up in the small, cramped apartment that belonged to Daroon Holdig. He returned on a separate craft with the command staff of the mining droids when their shift ended. The other officers mostly ignored him—like Holdig, the task of working on the droids was considered a dead end position at best and outright punishment at worst. Captain Markus was an example of that. None of the officers were friendly with each other at all, being bitter failures.

Still, the ride back was eye-opening for Harry. Even more than Holdig's stolen memory was the realization of just how human the Imperials were. They might as well have been commuters in the London rail for all their differences. The rage he felt when he first realized that the desecrators of earth were human began to burn again in his chest, but he fought to keep that rage carefully checked.

The Imperials themselves made every effort to keep the slaves from Earth ignorant. All interaction with the slaves was to be in full armour with helmets on. All communications were through droids to keep the slaves terrified and compliant. This was a direct order from the top of the command structure—Grand Moff Tarkin himself.

But once away from the slaves, the Imperials shed their helmets and became merely human once again.

Harry had always considered himself lucky, and his use of Holdig was even more so. The man had no friends, was generally disliked by his peers and performed well under expectations. Therefore no one even bothered to look at him when he stepped off the air-conditioned hover transport into the Imperial Compound for the first time.

Once through the fifty meter-high walls that separated the masters from the slaves, and the prisoner shanty-town that once provided workers before the lethality of the place burned through that resource, Harry found himself in what looked like an entirely different world. Unlike the desolation outside, the compound had carefully tended lawns, luxurious officer's quarters and apartment-style units for the Stormtroopers, and a large metal structure rising up in the centre near the skyhook itself that served as the command centre for the planet.

Once the officers departed the sled, they were off duty. After months as a slave, the idea seemed somehow shocking that Harry would have time to himself. He once again sifted through Holdig's memories until he knew where to go to find Holdig's apartment. The dead Imperial's security card again gained him entrance.

It was a small, cramped space, but even so Holdig had considered it a luxury. On board ships, lieutenants had to share rooms, while enlisted personnel slept ten to a room and had to share bunks. The room had a few personal items in it, including a little holo display that showed Holdig's parents on Corulag. He was an only child, spoiled almost from birth. He'd made it into the prestigious Imperial Academy only because of his father's bribes.

Holdig had a small kitchen, and a search through it found the remains of food from the last two meals he purchased. Harry ate the leftovers while tabbing through not just Holdig's personal files and accounts, but also through the base resources. It took some adjustment to be able to read Aurebesh, the written language of Basic, but once he made that adjustment (once again using stolen memories), he learned an astounding amount of information none of the captives from Earth had ever known.

When he went to sleep that night in another man's bed, he dreamed the same dream he had ever night, and remembered.

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

"_Tell us the story again, Daddy!" Lily asked._

"_Yes, please do!" Albus, the second oldest asked, while James merely nodded, being much too old and sophisticated to beg. _

_Faced with a coordinated assault from all three of his children, Harry Potter relented. "Fine, all you lot on the bed, then. This is the last story tonight, and then it's off to bed." _

_The children quickly gave their consent, and when he had their promise not to put off bedtime any longer, Harry positioned himself in the centre of Lily's bed while the three children gathered around him. Lily was nine, Albus eleven, and James thirteen, and all three stared at Harry attentively for one of the last nights before two of the three had to return to Hogwarts for their spring term. This was an unusual outing—all of them were getting old for such stories. But when they asked, Harry realized he would not have many more moments like this._

"_So … how to begin?"_

"_With 'One upon a time', silly," Lily said primly. "It's how all the good stories start!"_

"_Okay, that's how we'll do it. Once upon a time, there was a little boy who lived in a cupboard under the stairs…"_

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

"Hermione, can I talk to you?"

Hermione Granger, Unspeakable Second Class of the Department of Mysteries, looked up from the thick file she was reading and smiled in surprise. "Harry, what are you doing here?"

"Looking for you. Have a sec?"

"Of course."

Seven years after the fall of Voldemort, the Ministry of Magic had returned to a fully functional organization. Things were not perfect, or course. No merely human enterprise could be, but Harry's respect for Kingsley Shacklebolt never faltered. The new Minister of Magic did not win every battle, but he fought hard for the reforms Harry and his generation felt were essential to prevent another Voldemort from arising. Having the unwavering support of Harry Potter and Hermione and Ron Weasley did not hurt the Minister's efforts at all.

With seven years of hard-fought, often death-defying experience under his belt Harry was already an Auror Captain. Hermione started in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, but after three years accepted an invitation from Saul Croaker to work with the Department of Mysteries. It was a fast-track position into the upper administrative echelons of the DMLE, which oversaw not just the Aurors, but many other regulatory and law enforcement bodies. Harry knew that Ron planned to retire from the Auror department to work full time with his brother George when Hermione moved into the DMLE. It was a testament to Ron's maturity as a person that he was willing to give up his own career in the Aurors to further his wife's ambitions and better chances.

Also, he would make more money with George.

The two friends left Hermione's cramped office and made their way through the Department of Mysteries to the lifts, talking about life and loves, and Harry's son James, who was fourteen months old, and the expected second child. Hermione's first born was expected within a few months of Harry's second, since she was only newly pregnant.

Finally, they reached Harry's office in the Auror Department. As a captain, he ranked his own office rather than a cubical, with hefty privacy charms which he activated upon their entry. Hermione sat in one of the two chairs facing his desk, folding her unspeakable robes to hide her mostly invisible baby bump, and stared at Harry squarely. "Okay, out with it. Something's obviously on your mind."

Harry fidgeted nervously with his ring, and then with a sigh he flicked his phoenix-feather wand at his face. Hermione watched curiously for what would happen. At first, nothing seemed to change. However, the young Mrs. Weasley was not considered the brightest witch of her age for nothing, and leaned forward attentively. "Harry, what did you do?"

"I removed an aging glamour," he admitted, while staring at her intently.

Hermione stood and leaned over his desk, so close he could feel her breath. She reached out and touched his cheeks, then removed her dragon heartstring wand and performed a diagnostic charm. "Harry, you're still…you look seventeen! How can this be?"

Harry looked back down to his wedding ring and spoke without meeting her gaze. "I…I've been keeping a secret, Hermione. From you, Ron…even Ginny. I noticed three years ago. You've seen how Ginny matured after James was born. She's more beautiful than ever before, but she's…well, her face has changed. She's lost her baby fat and… she's aging, and I'm not. So I used a glamour charm on myself."

"But Harry, why?"

"The Deathly Hallows, Hermione. They came back to me."

Hermione settled back in her seat, her mouth gaping. "What do you mean?"

"The morning after the battle, I woke up with the Resurrection Stone on my finger, the Elder Wand in my hand, and the cloak of invisibility around my shoulders."

"What did you do?" Hermione asked.

"I broke the bloody wand and threw it into the lake with the ring, of course!" Harry said. "But the next morning…"

"They came back," Hermione finished. "Where are they now?"

"Er, I don't know."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, after a while I stopped fighting them, you know? It seemed pointless to keep breaking the wand and throwing the stone away, so one day I just stopped fighting. And they just sort of…well, disappeared. But I know they're still in me somehow because I can cast wandlessly as good as I can with my old wand. It's like the Elder Wand is actually in my magic, somehow."

Hermione was on her feet before he finished, wand in hand, and began casting a dizzying array of diagnostic spells, most of which Harry had not even heard of. Despite his experience and skill as an Auror, Hermione still outpaced him in terms of sheer magical knowledge. Whatever results she was getting back, though, left her confused and alarmed. She finally settled back on the very of the visitor's chair, as if she were about to bolt. "Why didn't you ever tell me before?"

"Because I was tired of being different!" Harry said hotly. "I wanted to be normal, just for once in my life. I wanted Ginny, and a family, and everything I'd never had, and this…this made me different again."

Rather than argue with him, Hermione merely nodded. That was as much a testament to her maturity as were Ron's actions to his. She no longer instantly argued with anything she didn't agree or approve of. Instead, she studied his face again. "I'm not sure how, Harry, but what you've thought appears to be the case. You're not aging, or if you are, the process has been radically slowed. I'll need to take a tissue sample to be sure, but at first glance you're experiencing normal apoptosis, so it's not that your cells are no longer dying. Rather, it seems that your cell division is unchanging."

She pointed her wand at Harry and cast a silent cutter. "Ow!" Harry said. "Why'd you do that?"

"Blood sample." She conjured a glass phial and pushed it to the cut. She started to heal it, but paused. "Harry, look!"

He didn't have to look, though. "It's healing, I know."

"This has happened before?"

"Remember that fight I had with Rowle in Gloucester? I couldn't block all of a severing curse that hit me in the chest. It wasn't lethal, since I did block some of it. I didn't want to leave off, so I continuing fighting, and when it was over I didn't think about it. The cut was healed in two hours. Last year, that gunshot I took in France? Four hours. It's getting faster and faster."

Hermione nodded, though her eyes looked far away. "So that means you can still be hurt, and that implies that you can still die. You're not impervious, then. But…Harry, you could be functionally immortal. What these charms are showing me is the same thing Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel experienced while living on the Elixir of Life!"

"So what do I do?"

Hermione shook her head. "I don't know, Harry. This doesn't appear to be a case where you can't die, only that you won't die of natural causes. But…let me do some more tests. I could be completely wrong."

"You think this has to do with the Hallows, then?"

Hermione pursed her lips. "I don't know, Harry, but it's likely. No one has ever possessed all three Hallows at once. How could anyone know someone could become the Master of Death if it hadn't been done before? And just what does that mean, being a master of death? I just don't know. But I promise, Harry, I'll find out for you."

Harry grinned, feeling vastly relieved to have one of his best friends helping him. "Thanks, Hermione. I knew I could count on you."

"You can thank me, Harry, by telling your wife and brother in law. I know why you kept it a secret, Harry, but you have to know how much Ginny and Ron love you. They deserve to know the truth."

Harry nodded. "I know. Thanks, Hermione."

Two weeks later, in a meeting with his closest true family, Harry told Ron and Ginny what had happened, and to prove it he removed his glamour. It was Hermione, having tested his blood, who provided the details. "Harry's magical core has been altered in a way never seen before," she said. "His magic has been saturated with…death, for lack of a better word. The same energy signature found in the Killing Curse saturates Harry's magic. But it's not killing him. Instead, what it appears to be doing is halting the normal degradation of his body that comes through the normal process of cell division. This means he'll heal faster, and if he ages, it is in a miniscule amount compared to us."

"Blimey," Ron breathed. "So you're unkillable?"

"If you cut my head off, I'd die," Harry said. "Same if you stabbed me in the heart. I just…I just won't age like normal."

"Why didn't you tell me, Harry?" Ginny asked softly.

He saw the hurt look in her eyes and said, "Because I was afraid, Ginny. I wanted to live a normal life with you so bad, I was afraid of what this meant."

"Were you afraid I wouldn't love you anymore?"

"I was afraid you wouldn't be able to," Harry admitted.

"You're a stupid prat."

"Yeah, I know. But I'm a prat who loves you."

"And I love you too, no matter what."

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

"…_best friends had many more adventures and lived happily ever after. The end."_

_Lily sighed in her sleep, snuggled as she was against his leg. Albus was nodding off, though James was still awake. Harry levitated his daughter up enough to get free, carried Albus in his arms, and motioned for James to follow to the boys' shared bedroom. He placed Albus down, kissing his forehead, before moving to James._

"_I know that story was about you, dad," James said sleepily. "I read about it in the Daily Prophet. Teddy said you're the most powerful wizard alive."_

"_I don't know about that. But think about this. Why do you think I ended it with 'happily ever after'?"_

"'_Cause you won?"_

"_No, silly," Harry said as he ran a hand through his eldest son's hair. It reminded him so much of his own. "I ended it that way because I have you, Albus and Lily."_

_As old and mature as James pretended to be, he couldn't help but smile. "'Night, Dad."_

"_Good night, son."_

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

Harry showered in Holdig's shower and dressed in Holdig's uniform. He sat that morning and performed a minute transfiguration on Holdig's ID until it matched his own appearance. It was easier than maintaining a glamour charm, and their appearances were not so very different. He planned to _Obliviate_ anyone who might know him well enough to tell the difference.

According to Holdig's schedule, he was to work a night shift, which left him the day to his own devices. He spent that time checking his monetary accounts, and then more time reading just what Imperial Credits were in relation to buying power. He quickly learned that Lieutenant Junior Grades were not well paid, and Holdig was not a very intelligent man when it came to personal finances. In fact he carried almost twice his contract salary in debt.

He was about to look for something else to eat when a heavy knocking brought him to his feet, ready Disapparate at a moment's notice. However, panicking usually made things worse, so he took a deep breath to steady himself and answered the door. On the other side was another Imperial in a military uniform—a full lieutenant.

"Lieutenant Holdig?" the man asked, glancing at Harry in surprise.

A spur of stolen memory made Harry snap to attention and salute, "Yes, sir."

"You appear different, lieutenant."

"Tripped and broke my nose, sir. Had some work done to fix it."

The officer, surprisingly, accepted that. "Very well, Colonel Nadist has requested your presence in the command centre at once."

"Yes, sir!" Harry rushed back inside, grabbed his uniform jacket, and followed the other lieutenant out the door. "May I ask what it's about?"

"We lost a refinery droid last night," the other lieutenant said darkly. "You must have been a sound sleeper since we could see the horizon light up from it."

"It was an exhausting day," Harry said honestly. "I almost lost my own droid."

"We know. Come, the colonel is waiting."

The two men left the officer's quarters and walked briskly across the compound to the ten-story command centre. Even with Holdig's memories, the place was a mystery, since the lieutenant had only been in it a few times. The building was crawling with perfectly human people, men and women, in a variety of grey or black uniforms, depending on whether they were army or navy. They reached a lift and soared to the top floor in a second, before reaching a wide, well-lit hall lined with glass walls. Behind the glass were spacious offices for the senior administrators of the base.

It was one of these offices that the lieutenant led Harry, before nodding and leaving. Harry stepped just inside, snapped his heels and saluted. He felt absolutely ridiculous doing so, but Holdig's memories were very clear regarding Imperial military protocol.

"At ease, Lieutenant."

"Sir, yes sir!"

Colonel Halabern Nadist sat behind his granite-topped desk and stared with a downturned expression at the datapad. "Last night, Refinery Droid Three had a critical nuclear reaction. Captain Haldern had the night shift, and before the refinery blew reported that he was unable to deactivate the droid despite the best efforts of himself and his crew."

Harry said nothing. Nadist put the pad down and looked up at Harry. Like the other officer, he did not seem to recognize Holdig, and so had no reason to question the differing appearance. "Haldern was not line material, but he was dependable. If he couldn't do it, then it was extraordinarily difficult. Imagine my surprise, then, that while investigating what happened I found out you had the same issue with your refinery droid and was somehow able to stop it. I've looked at your record, Holdig. Frankly you're not that good. So what happened?"

"Permission to speak freely, sir?"

"Oh, this should be good," Nadist said, leaning back in his chair expectantly. "Go on."

"Sir yesterday scared the hell out of me. I've always let my Wookiees handle the work and just lazed around. Suddenly there was a crisis the Wookiees couldn't fix for me, and for the first time in my life I had to step up and do my job. Honestly, sir, I think I was as shocked as anyone that I was able to do it. I remembered things from the Academy I never even thought I knew, and I got the job done. Well, mostly.

"Despite my concerns about the issue, Captain Markus only gave me and my crew ten minutes. So with that we got the droid running. However, the root issue remains. We need to shut the droids down, take the siding off the intake vents and clean them down to the filters. Most likely we'll need to change the filters as well. I'm sure, though, that if we do that we can increase the efficiency of each machine significantly."

Nadist did not move as Harry spun his tale. He considered using magic on the other man, but thought better of it. He remembered Shewtalla asking if he was a Jedi, and felt cautious regarding the unrestrained use of magic for fear of finding these Imperials had their own practitioners of it. However, Harry was also a former department head who had commanded witches and wizards in open battles. A glance at Nadist told him the colonel was not only a reasonable man, but a decent officer, slaver tendencies aside.

"So you're saying you actually grew up?" Nadist finally said.

"I'd like to think I at least made a start, sir."

Nadine snorted. "Let's find out. I want you to take a team of technicians out to the droids and clean out those vents. You have my authority to stop production as long as necessary for each unit. Those droids cost as much as a frigate, and this project is already four years behind schedule and four hundred billion credits over budget. We're not getting another refinery droid, so we're going to have to make the ones we have work better."

"I'll get it done," Harry said resolutely.

"Good. Congratulations on making full lieutenant. If you want to rise any higher, prove you're worth it."

"I will, sir. Thank you."

"Dismissed."

Harry left the office with his thoughts swirling chaotically. Saving the droids would, at least initially, save lives. Now he had to figure out how to save the rest.

* * *

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**Author's Note**: Once again I just wish to stress again just how much I appreciate Teufel1987, JR and Miles for beta reading yet another of my stories. As always, they make everything better.


	3. Man With A Mission

A/N: A day late, but here you go. Review responses are in my forums as normal. Thank you all for the overwhelming response. I hope everyone continues to enjoy!

* * *

><p><strong><span>Chapter Three: Man with a Mission<span>**

Harry had no idea how to do what he promised Nadist. Holdig himself would not have known, having never actually been given direct command of much of anything. His confident step faltered as he left the executive level of the headquarters and moved into the lift. A standard black protocol droid stepped into the lift with him.

Just on a whim, he said, "I don't suppose you know how to go about requisitioning a tech team for a special assignment, do you?"

The droid turned its view sensors toward him. "Why, yes sir, I would be happy to assist you. There are currently fourteen methods you could use to communicate with Acquisitions a desire to obtain the services of technicians, depending on the nature of the mission and how critical it is to the current base objectives and parameters. First you could use inter-compound instant…."

"So I just go talk to Acquisitions?"

The droid's eyes were perfectly round and lit from behind, and yet somehow it still gave the impression of blinking. "Well, yes sir, you certainly could. In point of fact, that would have been my thirteenth suggestion right after…"

"Where is Acquisitions?"

"Second sublevel, sir."

"Thank you."

The talkative droid stepped off on the fourth floor; Harry continued to the second sublevel. The halls were narrow, utilitarian grey and dimly lit. The passage had the feeling of emptiness Perhaps in the Empire, human resources was completely run by droids. "A step up, as like," he muttered.

He found the appropriate door and stepped into a small, cramped, nearly empty space filled with only a single black protocol droid almost identical to the one on the lift, and a single computer terminal.

"Good afternoon. My name is Lieutenant Holdig, I need to…"

"With respect, sir, you are not Lieutenant Holdig," the droid interrupted in a grating, masculine voice that reminded Harry of Percy Weasley. "The lieutenant is 24 years standard age, weighs roughly 84 kilograms and has brown hair. You appear to be in your late teens, weigh roughly 68 kilograms and have black hair. Additionally, my facial recognition program cannot identify you in any of my files. Therefore, I must conclude you are an imposter."

"Really?" Harry sent a pulse of magic, and suddenly the droid slumped over. A quick look around showed there were no officers on duty or even security monitors. It turned out visiting the acquisitions office in person truly was one of the last methods officers resorted to.

Harry hopped over the desk, popped the droid's back panel, and cast the technomage spell since he otherwise would have had no idea what to do. However, with magic guiding him based on his intent, he reached in and reset the droid's security protocols. When he hopped back over and reactivated it, the droid straightened and said, "How may I help you?"

"Two things," Harry said. "First, I've had facial reconstruction surgery and wish to update my file with my new biometrics. Can you do that from this station or must I go to personnel?"

"I can assist you, sir." It took ten minutes for the droid to overwrite Holdig's physical features, blood type and fingerprints with those of Harry Potter. When that was done, Harry then discussed with the droid how to go about requisitioning techs for a special task force.

"Technicians are unfortunately in short supply," the droid said. "All technical teams were moved to the station last month and are scheduled to remain there for the remainder of the project. It appears that Colonel Nadist has given you an unwinnable challenge."

The droids remark made Harry stop mid-breath. "What did you say?"

"Colonel Nadist has a history of testing officers he thinks show potential. He will give them a task which would be difficult if not impossible to accomplish using normal methods to see what if any approach they take to get around the problem."

Harry thought about that, and from his brief meeting, believed it. "Tell me, how much leeway do I have with the slaves?"

"Unless you have orders to the contrary, officers can use slaves however they see fit so long as those uses do not impact final mission parameters. Many use former prisoners from the prison colony as housekeepers, for instance."

"And training?"

"We have a variety of training programs available, of course," the droid said. "Neural interfacing is an effective means of imparting important information in a short period of time."

"Has neural interfacing been used on the Terran slaves?"

"Yes, sir, though the Terran slaves show some irregularities with their DNA, they are classified as baseline humans, and as such neural interface technology is quite effective for them. In fact, several conscripted technicians aboard the station originated as slaves."

"Where are the neural interface facilities?"

"Every slave dormitory has a conditioning chamber with five interfaces, sir."

Harry grinned as a plan began to take shape. "Okay, let's start with programs in Basic, droid programming and droid engineering."

"Yes, sir,"

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

"You men; come with me," Harry said as he stepped out of the personal hovervan he requisitioned from the transport pool. He pointed to a pair of Stormtroopers standing guard outside the main entrance of the slave dormitory. The two fell in behind him without comment as he walked into the monolithic structure that housed his old slave group. At night, most of the guarding of the slaves was done by automated weaponry and droids to minimize the amount of personnel necessary during evening shifts. Inside the door stood the ever-present protocol droid to translate, since none of the slaves knew Basic. At his command, it fell into place as well as they approached the slave hall. It was late, half an hour after the slaves had returned, and all were already fed, bathed and placed naked into their cages.

"Use the intercom to ask for all persons who recognize the word "Quidditch" to come to the main door for special duties," Harry told the droid. "Repeat that word exactly as I pronounced it."

The Stormtroopers behind him shared a glance but said nothing. The droid faithfully translated the message into the intercom. Harry, meanwhile, watched the security cameras. It was a risk, and if it did not work it would not affect his idea too badly, but if it did work it would make things easier. Statistically speaking, it had every chance of working.

"Some are coming," one of the Stormtroopers noted. Harry looked and fought of an urge to smile—some really were coming. A dozen at least, from first glance. That number was low, but then again wizards had less of a chance being caught than Muggles. Harry was only captured because he was on the frontline fighting the invaders. "Sir, I am required to remind you to wear your helmet at all times around slaves."

To the trooper who spoke, he nodded. "Indeed. Bring them out." He then pulled on the featureless black helmet that made all the imperials look so alien.

The two troopers released the locking mechanism of the slave quarters, stepped inside, and returned with a line of a dozen naked slaves. All appeared young at first glance, which was not surprising since the older slaves were the first to die: five men, seven women, all of European origins.

"Bring them to the conditioning chamber." Harry led the way down the narrow passageway that ran to a chamber he'd never seen, but just recently read about while researching his options. The chamber had five tables against a wall, and above them was a mounted neural interface unit.

"First five in the chairs," Harry said. "Colonel Nadist said I needed techs when none are available, so I'm just going to make my own."

"Yes, sir," the Stormtrooper said. The five slaves looked at the chair in terror but knew better than to resist as they were strapped in. Harry ordered the droid to begin the procedure, and then cast a privacy spell over himself and the remaining seven slaves.

"Do not respond to what I'm about to tell you," Harry said calmly to them in English, never taking his eyes of those receiving the entire Basic language in a flash of implanted neurons. "I am a wizard from Earth. London, to be precise. If you recognized the word Quidditch, I'm assuming you are either magical or know of magic. Those chairs are going to teach you the aliens' language and technology, enough to function in their society and to perform a specific job. Know this—the bastards that raped our world are human. Not human-like, but human."

He glanced at the seven and saw them struggling to keep their faces blank. The first five twitched occasionally in the interface chairs with involuntary spasms as information flooded their brains, but made no sound. When the procedures were done, the Stormtroopers shoved them off to make room for the next five.

Harry cast another privacy charm and repeated his message to the first five, who now spoke Basic and understood droid programming. When all twelve were done, Harry said, "Congratulations," Harry said in Basic when all were done. "You are all now conscripts for the Imperial Army. You are my technical team, and we will be extremely busy for the next few days. I understand that it takes at least six hours for the information to saturate your primitive little minds. Therefore, you are to return to your bunks with the other slaves. However, tomorrow you will be given separate assignments, and thereafter will be housed with conscripts. Return to your cots now."

The twelve looked down as they walked out of the room under the watchful gaze of the two troopers. Harry turned to the droid. "Does your facial recognition subroutine remember their faces?"

"Yes, Lieutenant, I will communicate your orders for tomorrow morning."

"Good. I will also require the Wookiee named Shewtalla. Please make arrangements with the charge captain that I am on special assignment from Colonel Nadist."

"I will inform all parties."

"Good. Dismissed."

Harry returned not to his personal quarters, but once again to the now very friendly droid in requisitions office in the Imperial compound. He was pleased to learn that barring any contradictory orders he had a massive leeway to do what he wanted with the slave population in support of his mission objectives. Elevating them to conscripts fell within that leeway, since he was not drawing resources from any other area.

It took a search by the droid, which Harry decided to call Weatherby, to find a temporary mobile personnel habitat in storage in the base. According to the base records, the transports originated as massive tanks called Juggernauts which were converted to be used as housing for the first Imperial residents as they established the penal colony on the planet. They were refitted to house fifty staff for up to six months at a time.

It was perfect. With a few forms and records, he had droids stocking the transport for extended use. He even requisitioned a Wookiee to act as the driver, since no other personnel remained on the planet to use it. He finally stumbled back to his cramped quarters, physically exhausted but mentally charged.

For the first time in months, Harry had a plan to finally do something. It might not gain him the revenge he wanted, but it was _something. _For the first time since it all ended, the numbness in his soul began to fade before a low flame of anger.

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

"_Tell us the story again, Daddy!"_

Harry Potter, Order of Merlin First Class, Grand Sorcerer, Director of the British Department of Magical Law Enforcement and Mage General of the International Confederation of Wizards, sat in a café off Piccadilly drinking coffee while discussing his godson's personnel file with his head Auror, Terry Boot. Teddy Lupin had just graduated from the Auror academy, and they were trying to find the best place to use the young Metamorphmagus.

Harry's own children were all at home at Grimmauld Place enjoying the last days of summer. This was to be James's last year at Hogwarts. He was not Head Boy, but he was a prefect and in the top ten list of a class easily five times as large as the class that saw Harry's friends finish. Harry wore his glamour, of course, because he was a forty-three year old man who looked seventeen without it. He would not be able to function in the Ministry if his staff knew his son looked older than he did.

Harry and Terry were still on their first cup of coffee when someone turned the wall telly up to full volume. The inch-thick screen dominated the entire wall behind the bar, and the two wizards, along with everyone else, could clearly see an image of space just a few hundred miles over their heads. In the centre of the screen it showed the International Space Station.

What truly captured the attention of all the people around them was not the space station, but rather the object floating ten thousand meters away from it. The object was roughly triangular, with what appeared to be a command tower at the thickest section of the massive grey craft. It was also huge, being easily a kilometre and a half or more in length.

More alarming yet, according to the reporter covering the story, two identical objects hovered over Beijing and Washington, D.C. "And there you can see it, ladies and gentlemen," the reporter announced from hidden speakers over the wall-sized display, which provided a view so clear it felt as if Harry were on the edge of space himself.

A space shuttle departed from one of the many spindly protrusions of the space station. It fired orbital positioning thrusters long enough to move toward the kilometre-long alien ship.

"Shuttle _Friendship_ has left the station and is proceeding slowly toward the alien craft," the speaker said. The announcer sounded male, young and nervous, but hiding it well, Harry thought.

"Ladies and gentlemen, something is happening!"

"This isn't good," Terry said, and Harry could only agree.

The view zoomed with dizzying speed to something on the arched dorsal side of the ship. Harry felt the pit of his stomach drop, while around him others gasped in dismay. What could only be a gun turret was rotating on the ship. It was not even the largest such turret they could see. It spun around until it pointed at the coming shuttle, and spat out a single bolt of green light.

Harry closed his eyes for the men and women on the shuttle, for the moment the green bolt struck the shuttle flared a brilliant white, and then was no more. Suddenly the whole ship began to spin on its long axis, bringing those turrets around to face Earth. The screen suddenly split into three images as satellite feeds brought them the sight of the other two ships doing the same thing.

"Oh my God," the announcer said, momentarily forgetting he was being broadcast, or more likely not caring any more.

Two more bolts of green light seared through space and impacted the station. It shattered like a water balloon impacting the sidewalk at speed, leaving only spinning shrapnel. "Terry, come on, we need to get to the Ministry!" Harry said.

"Right," Terry agreed in a hollow voice. Emerging in the street, they found the lanes choked with pedestrians staring up into the blue sky where, even in broad daylight, they could see the massive ship in orbit. The shape reminded Harry of a dagger poised to plunge into the heart of Britain.

He had only a moment's warning before a massive column of green light slammed through the atmosphere and into central London. Harry had a glimpse of clouds puffing away in rings from the energy that vaporized their moisture on the way down, and then white light. He grabbed Terry as everything went white and Apparated away. He emerged twenty miles away to see a mushroom cloud rising into the air where London used to be. "Terry, we have to get to…Terry?"

He looked to his long-time friend, colleague and classmate, and fought against the urge to vomit. In his haste to save him, Harry had splinched Terry in half. The half he held was blackened and charred from the explosion, proving that he could not have survived regardless. A second later, Harry realized that he too was burned. The pain struck with such shocking power he fell to his knees and screamed in agony.

It took all his will not to pass out, and more than that to point his wand at his arm to cast a burn salve charm. It took half a dozen of the charms to cover his arms, shoulder and back where he received the worst of the burns. He knew that even with his magic he should have been passing out from shock, but instead he felt numb and terrified.

In the distance, two more massive mushroom clouds joined the first as the alien craft continued to pound London.

The numbness extended not just to his body, but to his soul. He knew everything and everyone he loved was in London. However, before blind panic kicked in, Auror training took over. With a last glance at his dead friend, Harry Apparated to the Burrow. He appeared at the apparition point by the gate and stumbled with a sudden wave of dizziness. It must have come from his burns, but he shrugged it off and stumbled up the dirt path toward the Burrow. He had not even made it to the front door when he heard Molly's keening.

He didn't bother to knock as he stumbled in. She saw him as he stepped into the kitchen and screamed. "Harry, you're hurt!"

And, even realizing his whole body was covered in burn salves, she came barrelling toward him for a hug. He held up both hands and shook his head, not trusting himself to speak. Instead, he turned and looked at the reason for her grief. His heart stopped for a second as he saw the Weasley Family Clock, which had been expanded into a whole diagram of names. And yet, almost all the names were the same status: Black.

Fred and Angelina Weasley and their children, Fred Weasley II and Roxanne Weasley, dead; Ron and Hermione Weasley and their children, Rose Weasley and Hugo Weasley, dead; Percy and Audrey Weasley and their children Molly Weasley and Lucy Weasley, dead; Arthur Weasley, dead; Ginevra Potter and her children, James Albus Potter, Albus Severus Potter and Lily Luna Potter…._dead._

Bill, Fleur and their children were in mortal peril, as was Charlie and Molly. The only one that did not indicate mortal peril was Harry, but Molly was too heart-broken to mention or even notice it. Almost her entire family was gone in a single blast.

Something broke in Harry when he saw Ginny's and James's clock hands in the black. He felt something cold and hard forming in his chest. Molly was crying, gibbering in fact, while at the same time wiping her already clean kitchen counter with a rag. He knew, without question, that the loss of her family had destroyed her. Molly Weasley would never recover from such a loss. Not knowing what else to do, he gripped her shoulder and Apparated them both to Shell Cottage.

"Harry!" Harry turned and saw Fleur, her daughter Victoire and Teddy Lupin running into the cottage's den where they kept the fireplace. As numb as he was, he was still able to smile weakly at seeing his godson alive. "Harry," Teddy said, "what happened?"

"I was in London when it was hit," he said. "I Apparated out, but not before getting burned. They're gone, Teddy. All of them."

Molly simply collapsed to the floor, blubbering. Clicking her tongue, the still beautiful Fleur rushed to her aid, while Harry's godson and the young man's fiancée came to him. "We're hearing so many wild things over the wireless, Harry. What's going on?"

"Aliens," Harry said, surprised at how reasonable the once insane word sounded from his lips. "They destroyed the Muggle space station and then started firing on London, Beijing and Washington. They're all gone, Teddy. I saw the family clock." He couldn't trust himself to speak any more, and suddenly the dizziness became more than he could stand.

His last thought was that he would never again hear his precious little girl say, _"Tell us the story again, Daddy!"_

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

Harry woke with a start as his alarm went off. It took an act of physical will to push himself out of his bed and into the small fresher. He changed into his last clean uniform, using simple charms to ensure the fit, and dumped the piles of dirty clothes Holdig had left down the laundry chute for servicing.

The sun was just rising as he made his way to the transport bay to find his prize. When he arrived, even he was surprised at just how large the vehicle was. The ten-wheeled monstrosity looked vaguely like a beetle, only a beetle that was fifty meters long, thirty meters high and equipped with a heavy laser cannon and an anti-personnel laser cannon.

Standing in front of one of the wheels stood an ancient Wookiee, his fur long since gone to grey. He stood slightly stooped, and one of his canines was chipped off entirely. The ever-present droid was there as Harry approached.

"_Tell the pup I am Tooshil, and I stand ready," _the old Wookiee snarled.

Before the droid could translate, Harry said, "Good morning, Tooshil. I happen to understand Shyriwook, so please speak directly to me. I am Lieutenant Holdig. Droid, we won't have need of your services today."

"Yes, sir," the droid said before walking away.

When the droid left, Tooshil scratched at the thinning fur on his head. "_You're the pup Shewtalla spoke of?_"

"Probably," Harry said. "We must hurry—we have a dozen new conscripts to pick up."

The vehicle was so large it had its own turbolift, which dropped down from the central fuselage and carried them into the body. In the original specs Harry studied the previous night, the craft would have been filled with missiles, tabanna gas cells for the turbolasers, and infantrymen. Most of the armament had since been cleared out, and in its place were small alcoves containing two cots with small personal areas by each one comprised of a surface that could be a desk, table or entertainment hub.

With this configuration, it could comfortably house two hundred people for a month.

Harry followed Tooshil through the narrow hall to the command deck. The tank was almost as tall as the wall, and the whole machine thrummed like a factory droid as the ancient Wookiee started it up. "_Cub must wear his helmet in front of the primitives_," Tooshil said. _"The Imperials will know if you do not_."

"Yes, you're right."

Harry pulled his helmet on as Tooshil drove them through the open gates of the vehicle pool yard and toward the hoversleds in the distance which were even then loading slaves for the day's shift at the droids.

Standing to one side of the shuffling line waited the twelve possible witches and wizards Harry conditioned last night, flanked by Shewtalla the Wookiee and four Stormtroopers. Harry suspected the four Stormtroopers were a condition of his taking the slaves. Though he had enormous leeway with them, security had to be adhered to. A droid as always stood by Shewtalla to translate.

"Stay here and be ready to leave toward the refinery droids. We'll drive to droid one first."

Tooshil nodded with a grunt. Harry left him, walked through the long, narrow hall and reached the central lift. He emerged from the personnel transport with his black helmet on, making him look the same as every other overseer. "Load them up," he ordered in Basic.

He watched as the twelve young people in orange jumpsuits walked toward the lift, which was large enough to fit their entire party. "Sir," one of the Stormtroopers said, "Sargent Ala'shiil wished me to convey to you that standard procedure calls for slaves to be returned to the dormitory after eighteen hours."

"Thank you, trooper," Harry said. "However, these are no longer slaves. They are now conscripts and fall under Army rules of labour. Please secure the conscripts on the upper deck alcoves and then report to the galley for a mission briefing."

"Sir, yes sir," the Stormtrooper said. Harry knew from his reading that troopers were actually outside the normal army chain of command—they were the Emperor's soldiers first and foremost, and by protocol were merely on loan to the armed services of the Empire. However, in practice, Stormtroopers were also almost all enlisted, with a very small cadre of officers, and so naval and army officers often led the troopers in combat situations.

Harry returned the salute and watched as the troopers roughly herded the conscripts to their place. Harry motioned Shewtalla to the driver's chamber, and when they were sufficiently spread away from the troopers, conscripts and droid, said, "Are you with me?"

"_I owe the ravagers nothing but hate and contempt,_" the Wookiee said. "_Be it my life, I owe them nothing. But you…you saved my life, and the lives of many others. So for this, I am with you._"

"Good," Harry said, grinning behind his helmet. "Then come to the galley, please."

He and Shewtalla moved through the narrow hall that ran along the upper deck of the massive vehicle, which was even then barrelling across the desert at one hundred and sixty clicks an hour. When they emerged into the galley, the four troopers came to attention. Harry raised a hand, and with all his magic pushed out his most powerful _stupefy_.

The four troopers flew back against the far wall and slid unconscious to the floor of the galley. "_You are Jedi!"_ Shewtalla said.

"No, like I said before, I'm a wizard," Harry said. "Earth did not have these Jedi. I use magic. Can you turn that droid off and bring the others here?"

Shewtalla barked her consent and turned to do as he asked as Harry removed the helmets of the four troopers. By the second helmet, Harry started to feel less sure of himself, and by the forth he was actually alarmed. All four men were identical, with short-cropped, greying black hair, a Mediterranean or Polynesian skin tone and slightly Asiatic features. They had distinguishing features such as tattoos and varying styles of hair, but their colouring and facial features were identical. They also all appeared to be in their forties.

The first of the witches and wizards arrived and stopped just inside the galley, staring down at the four stunned troopers, then at Harry. Realizing he still had his helmet on, he undid the neck lining that kept it sealed tight, and pulled it off.

One of the women in front stared at him, mouth again, before she finally said, "Blimey, you're 'Arry Potter!"

* * *

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**Author's Note**: Once again I just wish to stress just how much I appreciate Teufel1987, JR and Miles for beta reading yet another of my stories. As always, they make everything better.


	4. Step By Step

A/N: Chap 3 review responses are in my forums like normal. Thanks for reading.

* * *

><p><strong><span>Chapter Four: Step By Step<span>**

"Blimey, you're 'Arry Potter!"

"_C'est impossible_!" another of the conscripts said. "'Arry Potter is over forty years old!"

Another of the men snorted. In English with a heavy Germanic accent, he said, "We are standing on an alien world in front of a Sasquatch from another world entirely, and you say something is impossible?"

"Enough," Harry said. "I _am_ Harry Potter. My supposed age is irrelevant. Who are you?"

The twelve gave their names, and some Harry winced to recognize some of them. "Melissa Wood, sir," one of younger of the seven women said.

"Oliver's girl?"

She nodded, eyes watering. "I remember meeting you when I was a little girl after dad won the Quidditch Cup before he retired."

"You still are a little girl," the wide-bodied woman said. To Harry, she said, "Martha Moreau."

Harry recognized the name. "French Aurors?"

"Correct. I guess I was never close enough in the dorm to see you, or else I would have recognized you even looking as young as you do. I served in one of your units against Delesteros in Bulgaria."

Harry nodded, thinking back to one of the many Dark Lords he was called on to eliminate not as an English Auror, but as a mage general of the ICW Enforcers. "Good to have you." To the thin, tall girl with brown hair, he said, "And you're Justin's girl, aren't you? Karen?"

"Katherine, sir," Katherine Finch-Fletchley said, blushing.

Once all the names were exchanged, Harry said, "Okay, here's what happened. Remember when the droid stopped working a few days ago, after that sandstorm? Stupid imps hadn't cleaned out those air intake vents in years. I recognized it was about to blow, ran into the command deck, and imagine my shock to see a stupid, perfectly human kid in command. As human and Muggle as you please. I won't lie—I lost my temper and Legillimized the hell out of him. Then I threw the bastard into the furnace and took over his identity. It's even in their computers now—I am Lieutenant Daroon Holdig. I've been given the assignment of fixing the droids, and I'm going to do it with your help. We're going to get those damned things running perfect, because if we do that, we might be able to save our people."

"How is that?" Moreau asked.

"I'm still working out the details," Harry admitted. "Taking over Holdig's identify was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but I think we can make it work. We start by taking the magicals out of those dorms and giving them that neural conditioning so we can treat them as conscripts. As conscripts, you all have at least some basic rights. Then we go from there. But no one's going to survive if those droids keep blowing up. Almost four thousand of our people died night before last. Our first priority is to save the droids."

He studied their faces intently. "Now, were you the only magicals, or the only ones who volunteered?"

"We were the only ones who agreed to risk being singled out and executed," Moreau said. "The girls at least knew most of each other."

"I know of a few more who stayed in hiding," the German, Albert Kaufmann, said.

"Good. We'll get them later. Right now, can any of you cast wandlessly?"

The younger people shook their head, but Martha Moreau, one of the Frenchmen named Salieri, and Kaufmann all nodded. "Good. Now, do any of you know the technomage spell?"

"I do," Moreau said.

She was the only one. "Then we have some work to do while we go," Harry said. "The neural interface gives you basic knowledge, but that spell will really help you use it. Even those of you who normally can't cast wandlessly will need this, so gather around..."

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

Harry stood at attention four days later in front of Colonel Halabern Nadist in the Imperial Headquarters as the balding officer read through Harry's report and recommendation. He placed Harry's datapad down and picked up another. "Each droid is reporting a twenty percent increase in production following your maintenance," he finally said. "Overall production has increased to the same level we had prior to the loss of droid number three."

"Yes, sir," Harry said, voice neutral.

"And you did this with slaves? Three days ahead of schedule?"

"Yes, sir."

Nadist leaned back and studied Harry with a blank face. "What made you think of using primitives?"

"You indicated I should take a tech team to act on my previous recommendation. When I found all active tech teams were permanently assigned to the Death Star, I assumed you had issued a challenge. I accepted, and sought other means of achieving my mission objectives. I have observed that the slaves were baseline humans. While primitive in comparison to the Empire, they did have technology, including limited space flight. It seemed a small leap to provide them neural conditioning to make full use of their potential."

"Close the door, Lieutenant."

"Sir."

Harry did as ordered, and then returned to his previous position. "You've demonstrated a great deal of initiative and potential, Holdig, so I will be brutally honest. The primitives are not going to ever leave this world alive. If the Senate discovered that Tarkin violated an untouched world of _humans_ for cheap slave labour, the unrest would make the Rebellion seem like a pittance. Not even the Emperor knows about the attack on their world, officially at least, and Tarkin fully intends to keep it that way."

Harry struggled to keep his face blank, while inside he raged. The raping of his world—the death of everyone he knew and loved—was nothing but a secret power-play?

"You can use the slaves anyway you see fit on the surface," Nadist said. "Your behaviour during this crisis has, as far as I'm concerned, wiped away any deficiencies of your previous record. You have shown a great deal of maturity and ingenuity. So, I am promoting you to Captain. With the loss of the droids and the increase in the work aboard the battle station, General Bast has ordered a general reorganization of our efforts down here. All senior staff is being reassigned to oversee the construction on the station directly. Ninety eight percent of the materials necessary to finish the station are already on board. You will be the ranking officer in charge of the refineries. Make sure production keeps up with demand, or you will find all the good you have done here quickly undone. In six months, during the Emperor's scheduled tour, planet-side operations will be terminated, as will all planet-side assets. As for you, Captain, your career will have taken on a very promising future."

"Sir, thank you, sir!"

"Dismissed, Captain."

Harry left the executive level of the headquarters building and stalked on stiff legs to his quarters, only to have his security card beep at him that his quarters had been reassigned, and his personal effects moved by the droid housekeeping services. He followed the instructions to a different dormitory that featured a much larger studio apartment with a balcony looking over the terraced grass compound, a larger kitchen area and a double bed. Holdig's things were already sitting at the foot of the bed.

Ignoring the trappings of his success, Harry collapsed on the edge of his bed and stared at his hands.

Six months, and they would all die. "What am I going to do now?"

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

With a sense of urgency he not felt since the hunt for the Horcruxes, Harry took over the whole ground production operation. While he'd never worked with the numbers like he had now, his experience as a Ministry department head and ICW mage general gave him sufficient experience in how to organize and lead.

The first step was to remove any obstacles that could endanger the mission. With a cold brutality fuelled by a deep, burning anger he could not shake, he Apparated from refinery droid to refinery droid, often taking Shewtalla along to speak to the other Wookiees while he killed the young, inexperienced officers who were placed in command of the droids.

He did the same to the cadre of Stormtroopers assigned as security for each droid, removing them unit by unit as he called them up to the command deck. He was still astonished that all the troopers carried the same face.

"_They are clones from the Clone Wars,"_ Shewtalla explained when he finally asked about it. "_The original generations of clones are too old for front line duty, so the Emperor puts them on worlds like this. They are worked until they die because they are conditioned to do nothing else. They cannot be returned to society because they were never a part of it."_

While their circumstances were unfortunate, Harry didn't let it stop him from killing them all. He knew that, being clones, if any of the originals saw any of his imposters, they would sound the alarm immediately.

The only way it would work was to eliminate the entire storm trooper population. The troopers were housed together, segregated from officers, and were required to wear their helmets at all times outside of their barracks. Any off time they enjoyed was in their own dedicated barracks.

So on that first day, with the help of the Wookiees, Harry apparated to each of the remaining droids and killed the troopers there. He stunned or paralyzed them _en masse_, had the Wookiees help strip them of their armor, and disposed of the bodies in the maw of the massive droids. This meant he had to work non-stop through the night shifts too. The stormtroopers, being older veterans who themselves were considered disposable now, stayed with the same shifts of slaves out of sheer laziness on the part of General Bast.

If they had rotated their men at least one, it wouldn't have worked. However, after one seemingly endless day that had Harry killing more men than in all the other fights in his life combined, he managed to wipe out the entire Clone population of Despayre and replaced them by terrified, but also exultant slaves.

This entire time, he had the Wookies processing slaves through the neural conditions in the hopes that he could at least make the replacements in Stormtrooper armor look like they knew what they were doing. He found one more magical in his dorm that could perform wandless magic, being a former Unspeakable who, like Harry, was captured fighting the Imperials when they invaded. With that help, they started handing out _Confundus_ charms like they were candy, doing everything they could to make sure no one realized what was happening to the planet's clone population.

The problem they soon had to grapple with was what to do with the majority of the slaves themselves. It was difficult to inform almost forty thousand slaves in five huge dormitories what was happening, only to then ask them to continue to live like animals. He talked it over with those he had already freed, and though it pained all of them, they agreed it would be safer not to inform all the slaves of what was happening. Instead, they continued to replace the Imperials in a piecemeal fashion, until they could move safely about their greater mission.

While they couldn't immediately take all the slaves out of the dorms, they did restructure the work into shifts to give the slaves more rest and water during the day while maintaining sufficient staffing to ensure production continued. Any drop in production risked inquiries into how Harry was handling things, and that would be a complete disaster.

Over all, though, it was Nadists' terrible deadline that kept him up at night.

Within two months of assuming command of the planet-side operations, Harry had all two thousand troopers replaced with his people. The neural conditioner had a program on Stormtrooper protocol that he used with abandon to give his false troopers as much authenticity as possible in case Colonel Nadist or General Bast toured his operation. As terrifying as those months were (when Clones were missing but he hadn't replaced everyone with a conditioned former slave yet) when they reached the point where every trooper was replaced Harry let himself relax ever so slightly.

But the Imperial officers were busy preparing for the termination of the ground-side operation, and so as long as production continued, they did not care what Harry did. He knew that the entire defense of Despayre and the Death Star was designed in keeping threats out. In that regard, they were successful. Harry knew from Holdig's memories the Rebellion had attacked several times and were repulsed with each attempt. What the Empire did not prepare for—could not have imagined, in fact—was primitive slaves rising up as a threat from without their own compound.

In the evenings, alone in his quarters, Harry pored over every scrap of information he had access to with the glamoured witches and wizards who had assumed the roles of the dead junior officers to try and figure out how to evacuate forty-thousand slaves before they were all slaughtered.

"We've been running those neural chairs non-stop since we started this," Moreau, the former French Auror, said during one of their daily meetings. "And we've only managed to replace the Stormtroopers. There's no way we could get our whole dorm conditioned, much less all the slaves in all the dorms."

"Why couldn't we just get a ship?" David Oliphant asked. The young Englishman was one of the first to step into the role of a now deceased lieutenant, just like Harry did with Holdig.

"Because there is no ship traffic to the surface at all," Harry said, having already researched the problem extensively. "Any ship attempting to reach the surface is fired on. There are two star destroyers in orbit at all times to guard the operation. Evidently the Empire has insurrections of their own they have to guard against."

"Those ships in orbit, are they like the ships that attacked Earth?" David asked.

Harry nodded darkly. "What about Portkeys? Could we rig the dorms as Portkeys?"

Darrin Montclaire, the Unspeakable Harry previously found, snorted dismissively. "It would take dozens of wizards of your power to charge something as large as a dorm to be a Portkey, and we don't even have wands. No, whatever means we use to move these people, it must be through technology. There are not enough wands to use magic."

Harry was experienced enough to accept the Unspeakable's hard truth at face value. He knew enough to do his job, but never claimed to be an expert on all magic.

"What about the Skyhook?" Melissa Wood asked timidly. "Could we escape on that?"

"Some of us," Harry said darkly. "The people we have in Stormtrooper armour, and ourselves. But they are guarding that thing pretty closely within every EM spectrum. Disillusionment charms would not work."

"It would be something, at least," Katherine Finch-Fletchley said. "At least some of us would be safe. Maybe we could use our people to take over one of those big ships."

Harry shook his head. "Each star destroyer carries almost three thousand troopers on board. They could carry as many as ten if they had to. Even if our people have gone through the neural conditioner, that doesn't make them physically conditioned or skilled enough to fight. No, we're going to have to figure something else out. Somehow, we have to get onto that station. It may require a more direct approach on my part."

"What do you mean?" Kaufman asked.

Harry smiled at them and then disappeared. They stared in surprise a moment before Harry reappeared. "It's a long story, but somehow I have a very good invisibility cloak on hand. It's the only magical artefact that can fool their sensor technology. I can't use it to hide lots of people, but if I can make it into the controls of the skyhook, I might be able to bring our people up."

"It's risky."

"I just don't see any alternative," Harry said. "And it's going to have to happen at the last minute, too."

He looked around, and the others nodded. With no other better ideas, they started working on their plans.

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

It was not possible for Harry to order forty-thousand conscript uniforms without attracting undue attention. So, when Harry was positive that Nadist's and General Bast's attention was firmly set on the Death Star, he and his growing body of conditioned Earthlings gave up all pretence of being slaves and began to openly recruit from the dorms. He couldn't help their living conditions, but he could finally tell the Earthlings that there was the light of hope in the near future.

The Earthlings, having gone so long without any hope, clung to this new light desperately and did not argue with the orders. The refineries had to keep working at full schedule, but now some slaves remained behind in the dorms every day so that the neural conditioning went non-stop, day in and day-out.

Harry did manage to obtain a few dozen conscript uniforms. He brought them to the main dorm, and at night transfigured the orange jumpsuits to look like the grey and white conscript uniforms. It was exhausting work, and only a handful of the magicals they found in the other dorms were capable enough with wandless casting to be of any help. But still, it was their only hope.

Production continued, only now the former slaves oversaw everything themselves, working hand-in-hand with the Wookiees, who thought the entire affair was entertaining.

The days wound down, and soon the Imperial compound became a ghost town as most of the staff relocated to the station. Nadist was the last ranking officer to leave.

"Two weeks, Holdig," the colonel said to Harry the day he was to take the skyhook up. "You've done remarkable work. I've already nominated you for a commendation. All production is to cease in twelve days' time. The final evacuation of personnel will occur on the thirteenth day, and on the fourteen day Grand Moff Tarkin has scheduled a test firing of the primary weapon on Despayre itself, so make sure you don't leave anything behind."

"I won't, sir. Thank you for all your help."

Nadist saluted and dismissed Harry, who walked calmly back to his quarters before collapsing on his bed. "Shite!" he muttered. "We're going to have to take the Wookiees too."

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

On the last day of formal production, after the quotas were met, Harry ordered all the droids shut down. The giant monsters had lived well beyond their senescence date and would not be transported off planet, since the cost of doing so would come close to the cost of the units themselves. All the slaves were gathered in their vehicles and transported back to their dorms.

They went through the feeding and showering lines of their own volition, as they had since Harry recruited them all into the mission, and then dressed in their transfigured conscript uniforms as they shuffled into their beds. Once settled in, Harry opened the intercom system not just in his original dorm, but in all five.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is Harry Potter. As you now know, the Imperials plan on killing us all rather than letting us return to our planet. Today was our last day of work. Tomorrow, the Imperials will evacuate the last of their people, and the day after they will destroy the whole planet. We are not going to be on it when they do. Right now, the Imperial Compound is almost empty. Our people are going to begin escorting you on foot into the compound, where you will spend the night in now empty dormitories. It is going to be a _very_ tight fit, but we have to do this now. So, Dormitory One, please begin lining up at the front door and follow the instructions of your guides. Be quick, but do not rush or panic. The Wookiees will also be coming with us."

Harry led the very first line of his fellow Earthlings toward the compound. They went through the Stormtrooper entrance after Harry deactivated all the security sensors that lined their path. The fit in the now empty dormitories that once housed the planet's compliments of troopers and infantry was indeed tight, but no one complained.

The process continued throughout the night, until all forty thousand slaves had left the dorms and were now packed into two large buildings meant to house Imperial soldiers, Stormtroopers and enlisted personnel. The Wookiees stayed in the now empty vehicle pool, crowded together as tightly as the humans, if not more.

The next morning at dawn, Harry as the ranking officer oversaw the last Imperials leaving the planet. Most were base personnel who had never been near the refinery droids and were in charge mainly of making sure no important data was left behind. Harry walked with them toward the massive skyhook pod, oddly excited to finally get to ride it.

The skyhook was the actual realization of a science fiction idea first proposed on Earth by Ray Bradbury. It was in essence a space lift designed to carry raw materials from the surface to the station overhead. It had an astonishing load capacity, as witnessed by the hundreds of tons of quadranium plates that were already loaded onto it from the last days of the droid refineries. The fifty or so personnel who were left all boarded with Harry, and moments later they shot skyward.

The door to the pod, which could almost have held a refinery droid, swung closed with a ponderous whine and then the boom and hiss of the seal. The whole door was composed of transparisteel so Harry was able to watch as they began to rise into the air. He felt only a momentary dizziness as the skyhook shot them higher and higher at speeds inconceivable on Earth. Soon they could see the curvature of the planet itself before the horizon became lined in black, followed by the twinkling blackness of space itself. At first Harry thought the twinkling was from stars, but then realized it was actually debris from construction that had formed a thick ring around the planet.

Some pieces impacted the elevator with loud, even deafening thuds, but nothing broke through. Soon they saw a new inverted horizon opposite that they just left. The entire car began to rotate slowly, spinning the view until they no longer headed up away from Despayre, but rather down toward the Death Star surface, which looked grey, lifeless and cold. Nor was it finished. The sky lift continued directly into the girder exoskeleton of the station until the lift passed by the fitted front of a large, well-lit receiving bay crawling with hundreds of workers and droids.

The moment the pod bay opened, massive droid lifters reached in to begin hauling away the plating. Harry followed the personnel out until they came to a security station that blocked off part of the receiving bay. Harry waited until all others were gone before he stepped up to the kiosk. A bored lieutenant sat behind the desk. "Is that it, then?" the man asked, thinking Harry was Captain Holdig.

"No, we have quite the load of conscripts coming," Harry said. Before the man could protest, Harry cast a wandless, silent _Imperio._

"Oh," the man said, eyes widening as the magic took over. "So we do. It's not in the system, though. What should I do?"

"Enter it into the system, please. By order of General Bast—you spoke to him personally. We'll need quarters for them as well, humans and Wookiees."

"Very well, sir."

"Where is the skyhook control room?"

The ensorcelled lieutenant pointed out the window looking over the cavernous receiving bay. Harry narrowed his eyes, cloaked himself in invisibility, and then Apparated to just inside the window he saw.

No one knew he was there, and with a few silently cast spells, the skyhook was soaring back down to the surface to pick up the conscripts. A quick glance out the window toward the security checkpoint revealed another officer talking loudly to the one Harry ensorcelled. He Apparated right behind the new man and cast yet another _Imperius_ curse, stretching even his magic in the process. To hold so many under the curse would have been a challenge even for Voldemort, and Harry found himself sweating with the effort. However, with the senior shift officer under his control, the new orders were entered into the system to account for the introduction of forty thousand new conscripts and the twenty thousand Wookiees who remained on the surface.

It felt like Harry didn't breathe at all until an hour later, when the massive pod slid smoothly down into the receiving bed and began to disgorge thousands of "conscripts" with their Stormtrooper guards.

Harry could actually see his first selected people among the conscripts, impersonating junior offices supposedly in charge of the workers. Among them was young Melissa Wood, Oliver Wood's oldest daughter, and the French Auror he served with on the continent, Martha Moreau.

They walked calmly toward the security kiosk and the two ensorcelled officers who would admit them into the greater portion of the station. As they approached the security checkpoint, though, something began to gnaw at Harry's perceptions. He searched the receiving bay, desperately looking for a threat, but he didn't see anything.

Then it hit him. He didn't see _anything_, or any_one_! In the hour the pod had taken to descend to the surface and return, the entire busy receiving bay had been emptied. His instincts screamed at him that something was terribly wrong, and those instincts were proven right before Harry could even act.

It began with a sudden wind that in a second became a raging maelstrom. The pod suddenly ripped up and out of the bay, still wide open and half-packed with Harry's people, and shot into open space in the suddenly depressurized bay. Harry was about to Apparate down to cast a shield that might hopefully slow the loss of atmosphere when the door opened behind him and Stormtroopers came pouring in, firing indiscriminately. He shrouded himself with invisibility, Apparated to one side of the room, and then the other, while the dozen troopers rushed in. Once they were in, Harry stepped outside and sent his most powerful blasting curse at the windows that overlooked the bay.

The wall blew out, sucking the Stormtroopers out into the suddenly depressurized bay in the process.

Harry disappeared in a swirl of magic and appeared on the floor of the bay, only to be pulled toward the gaping maw himself. Around him, terrified people screamed in horror. With all his magic, Harry shouted out a shielding charm directed at the bay door.

The drain was shocking—Harry could actually feel his magical core depleting—but the sudden depressurization stopped. People fell back to the floor around him, still screaming. "Get to the security kiosk!" he shouted to them. "Go, this won't hold!"

People knew him enough by this time to obey and started running wholesale toward the kiosk. Harry, using every ounce of his magic to hold the terrible vacuum of space at bay over the hugely wide bay opening, could only stand and watch as a massive black wall slid up from the floor, cutting the kiosk off from the bay. The wall rose all the way to the ceiling of the bay.

Across the wall, at various points, slits opened up to reveal large e-web automated anti-personnel laser cannons. Harry did not even have a voice to scream as the weapons opened fire with the deadly efficiency he had come to hate so much in his captors. The last to stand were the magicals, who through concerted wandless or accidental magic, managed to shield themselves for the first few hits.

Melissa Wood turned and stared at Harry, eyes wide with terror. Harry wished desperately that his eyes were as bad as they were before he absorbed the Hallows into his magic, because he did not want to see the sacrilege the laser blast committed to her body when it broke through her accidental magical shield.

He did not want to see the magic and life bleed out of Oliver Wood's little girl, who was so awed to meet _the_ Harry Potter she cried that first meeting, so many years ago. Albert Kauffman, Katherine Finch-Fletchley, Martha Moreau…one by one they fell, until the only person left standing in the receiving bay was a magically exhausted Harry Potter.

Realizing how complete he had failed, Harry let his shield go, fully prepared to be sucked out into the blackness. However, when nothing happened, his trembling knees gave out and deposited him on the floor of the empty bay.

"_Tell us the story again, Daddy!" Lily asked._

Harry closed his eyes as his little girl's voice echoed in his mind. He did not see, nor even care about, the blue bolt that struck him down into the darkness.

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**Author's Note**: Yeah, this was a pretty brutal chapter. But rest assured, my friends, that Harry's adventure is just getting started. Also, once again I just wish to stress just how much I appreciate Teufel1987, JR and Miles for beta reading yet another of my stories. As always, they make everything better.


	5. The Prisoner

A/N: Chap 4 review responses are in my forums as normal.

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><p><strong><span>Chapter Five: The Prisoner<span>**

"_Oh Harry, they're hurting you._"

Harry could not see her, but he recognized the voice as he would recognize his own. It was his Ginny speaking to him. If he were not the Master of Death, he might think he was hallucinating her voice as a result of the torture he was currently undergoing.

Of course, being the Master of Death did not mean he _wasn't_ hallucinating, only that there was the real possibility that it actually was the soul of his dead wife talking to him. _God, how he wished he could see her and touch her_.

The Imperials were hurting him. Though he could not see any of it for some reason, he knew they had his body strapped to a gurney that they could lower face-down onto something that hurt. He could not tell what it was, only that the pain was similar to the _Cruciatus. _ It was not the pain of physical damage, but rather felt like direct nerve stimulation. They weren't even really asking questions, they were just torturing him.

_I miss you, _he thought to his wife, even as he screamed aloud. Some tough men thought they had to stay silent during torture, but Harry knew that silence meant nothing. Screaming was a release; an exercise in survival. So Harry let the screams come without hesitation. Meanwhile nestled deep within the folds of his Occlumency, he spoke to his dead wife.

"_You know I'll always be with you,_" Ginny told him. "_The kids aren't alone, I promise._"

Harry was already crying from the pain, so what did a few more tears matter? _I'm going to get them, Ginny. If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to get the bastards who hurt you._

"_Harry, don't be a prat_," she said, sadness colouring her voice. "_If you want to remember us, then _live_ and remember us. Protect the living. That's what you've always done. Protect the living and honour the dead. Be strong, love. Be strong and live for us."_

_Ginny, wait! Don't go!_

"He's ready," a harsh voice said in Basic.

Harry felt rough hands grab his arms and yank him off the table. He could not see, but he could feel easily enough and struck out with magic at the man on the right. His efforts earned him a sharp, agonizing blow to the stomach. The pain was so intense he barely felt the needle thrust into his neck.

He did feel the icy cold creep of the drugs in his veins as the rough hands let him fall to the floor. The drug made his whole body feel heavy, so heavy not even his magic responded. He wished he could see—they must have blindfolded him. He wanted to see because the air grew colder, and he heard a strange new sound enter his space.

_Hoooo-burr. Hooo-burr._

"Why can't I see?" Harry's voice shocked even him; it was so reedy and strained from his screams.

"You have been fitted with optic inhibitors," a deep, mechanical basso voice said. "Your demonstration of power just now has proven the Emperor's wisdom. He sensed your efforts from across the galaxy, and your power. You kill with a touch."

"Who are you?"

"It is I who will ask the questions." When the man did not speak, there was the interminable _hooo-burr_ sound, like an old Muggle iron lung. "What did you do with the clones whose armour your slaves wore?"

Harry gritted his teeth and said nothing. He felt a sudden, shocking strike against his _Occlumency _barriers. It was as strong as anything Voldemort or Snape could do. If not for his experience and own skill, the attack would have easily broken through.

The monster continued speaking as if nothing had happened. "How did you obtain the conscript uniforms? How did you assume Daroon Holdig's identity? Where is Lieutenant Holdig?"

"Ask your mother, you bloody tosspot," Harry snapped.

The only thing worse than being back-handed by a large, powerful man was not being able to see it coming. The blow made the darkness flash white for just an instant, and Harry felt himself slamming against a hard, cold metallic wall.

"There is no question of whether you will answer or not," the deep-voiced man said. Harry struggled to get an image of him, and for some reason kept thinking of the bad guy from the first _Conan_ movie—the one that really launched Arnold Schwarzenegger's career. "The only question is how much pain you will feel before you do so."

"Bring it on, Thulsa Doom," Harry whispered around the blood in his mouth.

And so the figure, whom Harry named Thulsa Doom in his head, did just that.

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

Harry learned a lot from the questions he was asked. He did not count days, but rather torture and interrogation sessions, which always went hand in hand. He was aware occasionally of being fed and watered, but those instances blurred. All that mattered was the torture and interrogation. Nor were the sessions always conducted by Thulsa Doom.

His fourth or fifth (he couldn't remember) session was handled by an extremely informative interrogator who sounded like he was in his twenties or thirties. It was from this interrogator that Harry learned that not only did the Empire not know who he was, but they had lost the Earth entirely!

Was Harry or his people connected with the destruction of the Imperial Star Destroyer _Undauntable_? How did he discover Admiral Helaw was the man who discovered Earth? Why did Admiral Helaw fail to divulge the coordinates of the world to Governor Tarkin? Why did Admiral Helaw slave the navigation units of the other ships in his command rather than simply provide them the coordinates? Was Helaw working in conjunction with the Rebels? Did the Rebels target the _Undauntable_ because of his actions against Earth? Did Harry?

Those questions held back the tide of hopelessness that had been slowly creeping through Harry's soul. He learned that the attack on Earth was commanded by an admiral named Helaw who was now dead, along with his ship, and all the computers that held earth's coordinates. Which meant, at least for a while, any survivors on Earth, if there were any, were still safe That spark of hope was enough to sustain him.

The torture ran the gamut, of course. From deprivation, to physical beatings, to psychological torture and drugs, they worked him over repeatedly. All of it was made worse by Harry's blindness. But he said nothing to them other than to insult them and took the beatings in stride. Whatever happened to him, his people were safe. In Harry's mind, he had nothing left to lose.

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

Without vision, there was no way for Harry to track time magically. The _Tempus_ spell was visual, after all, and while Harry was adept at using and learning spells, creating them was always Hermione's bailiwick. He could not make a spell that would speak the time. However, it felt like he was in his cell, undergoing daily interrogations, for months at least.

Things did not change, however, until he got a neighbour.

It was part of the general philosophy of the Empire that all the cells ordinarily have a common air circulation system. That way, if a riot required the central command desk to gas everyone, they could do so with greater efficiency.

Harry could not see his neighbour at all even if his eyes worked, but he could hear her clearly through the vents as she wept. It was not the weeping of a frightened girl, though. It was the crying of loss and rage in equal parts. It was an expression of what Harry himself felt so acutely, even if he could no longer cry aloud.

He wanted to say something, but he knew there was nothing he could say that would make it better for her, and in fact it would be seen as an intrusion to her privacy at best. So instead he lay on his cot and listened to the girl cry in rage and loss until he went to sleep.

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

When the door next opened, Harry thought and even expected to begin his day's torture and interrogation. However, the footsteps were too muffled to have come from his cell. Suddenly the voice of Thulsa Doom rang through the vent that connected Harry's cell to his neighbours'.

"And now, Your Highness, we will discuss the location of your hidden Rebel base." Accompanying the mechanical basso voice was the familiar, bitter hum and beeping of one of the many interrogation droids the Imperials used.

Harry strained despite not being able to do anything about it, until he heard the first whimper of pain, followed by a moan, and then a scream as the full torture session began. After a while, Harry stopped straining to hear, and instead covered his ears, flashing back to that terrible day in the Malfoy's basement, where he and Ron were forced to listen as Bellatrix tortured Hermione.

With all his might, Harry wished he could do something about it. Harry could accept pain and torture—his tolerance was beyond that of most because of his personal circumstances and his fate as a child. But his tolerance of others in pain was nil. What he could handle with resolve shattered him when applied to another. Though he did not immediately realize it, his magic responded in the only way it could. Not all at once, of course, but it definitely responded.

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

His neighbour the princess underwent two more long, gruelling torture sessions that made Harry curl up on his cot and weep in helpless, impotent frustration. On the third day, though, he heard the girl break.

There was no torture session, nor screams of agony. In fact, from what he could hear Thulsa Doom simply came in and led her out. Harry did hear a deep, reverberating thrum under his feet, but nothing to indicate what it was.

But when the girl returned, she wailed with the despair of one utterly without hope. In his mind, he saw her fall to her knees as she cried, and he knew in that instance that she had broken. Even if she never told them whatever it was they wanted to know, a part of the princess's soul had broken. Harry felt a surge of rage at the monsters that would break a girl who was strong enough to go through so much torture, and with a sudden, almost audible_ snap and a sharp stabbing pain behind his eyes,_ Harry could see.

And a moment later, he appeared with a pop in a cell identical to his, but already occupied. His newly restored sight showed him a slim petite figure all in white, splayed out over the floor with her face cradled in her hands. Her wails had eased into a deep, despairing grief, but still she wept.

Harry stood frozen a moment, surprised not only by a blind apparition, but that his magic would bring him to her. Slowly, since his body was still stiff and sore from his torture sessions, Harry sank down onto the floor and studied the girl who was so lost in her own loss she did not even realize he was there.

Not, that is, until he spoke. "What did they do?"

Her response was instant. She stopped crying, scrambled in a crab-walk to the back wall, and glared with red, tear-streaked eyes. "Haven't you done enough!" she hissed.

"What did they do to break you?" Harry asked again. The need to know what they did to this girl overrode any other concern. "They tortured you for days, but that only hurt you. But what they did today, it broke you."

"I am not broken!" she said indignantly, even as she wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "I told them nothing!"

"You may have kept your silence, but you did break," Harry said. "I know I did, when they killed my family. What did they do to you?"

"It's a trick. You're just another informer."

"WHAT DID THEY DO?" Harry screamed.

The girl winced but did not shy away in fear. "They destroyed Alderaan. With a single shot, they murdered four billion innocent people."

Unspoken in her words was the message, _And everything and everyone I loved._

"Was it Tarkin?" he asked.

The girl nodded. "Who are you?"

"My name is Harry Potter," he said. "And once upon a time I had a wife and kids, and dear friends who were my family. After a bitter life of fighting, I'd found peace, love and happiness. Tarkin took it all away because he burned through the prisoners on Despayre too fast and needed more workers. So they sent ships to my world—we'd never even made it past our own moon. We wondered if we were alone in the Universe, and the day we found out we weren't was the day Tarkin's star destroyers burned our cities to the ground, stole our people by the tens of thousands, and killed everything, and everyone, I'd ever loved."

"You're too young to have a family," she finally said.

"And you're too young to have your soul broken," he whispered back.

She bowed her head. "Leia. My name is Leia."

"Leia. Are we aboard the Death Star?"

"Yes."

"And Tarkin is here?"

She nodded mutely.

"If I got us out of this room, could you show me where?"

"Why?"

"Because I'm going to kill him," Harry said. "I'm not going to torture him or vandalize his body. I'm going to kill him quickly because the Universe can't abide to let monsters like him survive."

"He's surrounded by soldiers, and Darth Vader is always by his side. You'd never make it."

"I'll admit we probably won't make it off the station," Harry said. "But we could reach Tarkin. It would only take a moment to kill him."

The princess pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them. "It's a cruel trick, you know. Torture, and them murdering my home world. And now I'm supposed to believe you? What do you expect to gain? I'll not tell you anything…"

Harry held out a hand and summoned a bluebell flame. She stared at it with wide eyes.

"On my world, there is a small subset of the population that could use magic. The Wookiees on Despayre said I was a Jedi, but I don't think I am. I have the gift of magic. I can change our appearance—I can force other men's wills to my own, or remove any memories they have of us. I can force that door open, stun all the men guarding us, and then remove their memories of the escape so they never know we were gone. That should give us enough time to get to Tarkin."

"And then what?" she asked. "If you're so powerful, why haven't you already done it? And if you do kill Tarkin, do you think the Empire will just stop because you killed one Moff? The Death Star will still be around to destroy worlds. The Emperor will still be around to oppress the galaxy. What will killing Tarkin do?"

"It will be one less monster in the universe," Harry said. "They fitted me with optic inhibitors. I can't really use my magic if I can't see. But finally I was able to break the inhibitors."

"Why?" she demanded.

"Because of you."

For the longest time she simply stared at him, but in her brown eyes, which were a shade darker than Ginny's, he could see her mind working furiously, weighing the odds, the costs and the potential benefits. Finally, she said. "Okay. Why not? I have nothing else to lose."

"Good. Help me up, will you?'

Her eyes bulged. "You just bragged about all you can do, and you need help to stand?"

"I've been here for longer than you, and they've been working on me just as hard. I'm sore," Harry whined.

With a roll of her eyes Leia stood and pulled him with effort to his feet. Once standing, he was surprised at how short she was. Harry himself was five ten, and yet he stood a good nine inches taller. Having been married to a woman who was as tall as he was without heels, it was an interesting experience. For some reason, it made him feel more protective.

"What?" she snapped.

"You're short."

She stared, mouth agape, for a second. Finally she said, "Has the torture driven you insane, or are you just stupid?"

Unable to stop the grin, Harry said, "A bit of both, more as like. How thick is this door, do you know?"

"Why?"

"They put an optic inhibitor in me," Harry explained again. "I only just now got my sight back. I have no idea where we are or how thick the doors are. I only got in here because of your voice."

"It's perhaps a foot thick. Outside is a raised walkway, perhaps three feet above the floor in here."

Harry smiled, wrapped an arm around her waist, and Apparated eight feet forward and three feet up.

The two appeared in a narrow hall atop a raised grate between heavy metal doors. At the far end Harry glimpsed a larger open area, and with that visual confirmation, Apparated them again to it. He and the stunned princess appeared in a large, round room filled with half a dozen men in dark grey or black uniforms. Before any of the startled Imperials could bring their weapons to bear, he cast a broad-area stunning spell used by Aurors to quell riots.

It got everyone, including the Princess.

He cast a silent _Ennervate _on her and watched as she blinked awake, rolled onto her side, and then threw up. "Sorry about that," he said. "Most people feel pretty bad after their first Apparition."

When he was sure she was done, he vanished the mess. She scrambled to her feet, staring at him with wide brown eyes. "What are you? Jedi can't…do whatever it was you just did!"

"It's called apparition, a form of magical teleportation," Harry explained. "And I told you, I'm not a Jedi. I'm a wizard."

"Are there…are there others who can do that?" She looked around at the stunned men on the floor.

"Several million, though I was probably better than most," Harry said. Then he added, "Assuming they survived Tarkin's culling. So, you know where Tarkin is?"

"Wait, there were men captured with me. I need to know if they're still alive." She pushed past Harry, already over her shock at his abilities, as she reached the computer console and started paging through records.

He could tell the news wasn't good just by how her narrow shoulders sloped. "Dead, all dead," she whispered. "Vader ordered them all tortured to death. There were two hundred men on my ship."

"I'm sorry," Harry said simply.

She turned her expression setting into one of resolve on par with anything he'd ever seen before. "I can get you to Tarkin, but you're going to have to make sure they can't find us."

Harry levitated the stunned men to the centre of the floor and then _Obliviated_ them. "Come here," he said, motioning.

She came to his side, hesitating only a moment, before she allowed him to pull her close. From the centre of his magical core, he wished for his cloak, and just as he and the princess disappeared, he _enervated_ the Imperials.

Leia stiffened as the Imperials stood, shook off the effects of both the stunners and the _Obliviation_, and went about their jobs with no clue that Harry and Leia stood in their midst. With a nudge of magic, Harry made one of the officers behind the desk straighten and open the door out of the detention centre; the two escapees slipped past him easily.

Blinking in confusion, the Imperial went back to what he was doing and let the door close.

"How did you do that?" Leia whispered. She was clinging to his side with a tight grip. "Why can't they see us?"

"Because we're invisible," Harry whispered back. "Where to?"

"The over bridge probably requires security access," she said. "So we need to find an officer of sufficient rank to get us in."

And then a general stepped out of the nearest turbolift. "Cassio Tagge," Leia whispered. "Our sources say he's an executive officer. He'll do."

The man was obviously walking toward the detention centre Harry and Leia just vacated, probably to question the Princess further, but Harry stopped that. A quick, silent _Imperius_ curse brought the man to a sudden stop. At Harry's urging he turned around and started back to the turbolift, and the two escapees followed right on his heels.

"What's happening?" Leia whispered.

"I have him under control," Harry said in a normal tone of voice. Through the marvel of Imperial Engineering, the turbolift travelled through a vacuum tube at incredible speed, traveling dozens of kilometres in just seconds, until it came to a stop.

"Authorization required beyond this point," a mechanical male voice said.

"Authorization Tagge, Cassio, _Aleph Deltiria_."

"Acknowledged, General." The door opened, and Harry and Leia followed Tagge onto the Over Bridge of the Death Star. Beside him, Harry felt Leia stiffen noticeable and he saw why immediately.

Through the massive view screen that dominated one wall of the over bridge, he could see a still cooling and expanding gas cloud that had once been her world. With the utter destruction of the planet, there was not sufficient gravity remaining for the material to re-accrete. "For them too," Harry whispered to her, hugging her tight.

"General Tagge, has the princess already been executed?" an old, wiry man with gaunt features and thin hair said in a clipped, precise tone.

The general stopped mid-step and blinked in confusion. "Excuse me, Moff Tarkin? What do you mean?"

_Tarkin_.

Harry let his cloak drop. "Forgive the general, Tarkin. He wasn't himself."

Tarkin turned and stared at the interlopers. He did not appear to recognize Harry, but his eyes widened in surprise at the princess. "Princess Leia, as much as I look forward to your execution, you most certainly did not have to come here to let me see it in person."

"Leia isn't the one who is going to die today, Tarkin," Harry said.

Around the bridge, security officers with oversized helmets and black uniforms brought blaster rifles to bear. Tarkin, though, ignored them, and said coolly, "Oh, and who might you be?"

"My name is Harry Potter. You killed my family; prepare to die." _It was Ginny's favourite Muggle film_,he thought to himself.

"How droll. Guards, kill them both."

Suddenly the over bridge erupted in fire, but not the kind Tarkin anticipated. Harry swung his arm and hand in a circle, and suddenly a whip of fire a foot thick lashed out in a circle that encompassed Tarkin, Tagge, Leia and himself, but cut off the rest of the bridge. Those guards who tried to rush the fire screamed as the living flame consumed them.

Tarkin lost his distracted smirk. "What is this?" he demanded.

Harry, though, let the flame go to continue circling them and pulled on the Hallows within his magic. The air between he and Tarkin shimmered, and suddenly four people stood where before was nothing. Beside him, Leia shivered, as if sensing on a fundamental level that she was in the presence of death.

"_Harry, what are you doing_?" the shade of Ginny asked.

"I want you to see who killed you, Ginny," Harry told her. "I want you to know that I've avenged you."

She shook her head sadly, while holding the grown children around her. "_We are beyond vengeance, Harry. What you do, you do for yourself_."

"Then for myself," Harry said. Beyond them, he saw horror on Tarkin's face as he too felt himself in the presence of something beyond life.

Harry struck the Moff with his most powerful entrails-expelling curse. Tarkin's face paled and he made several gagging sounds before he regurgitated his own stomach and intestines all over the floor at his feet. He fell dead seconds later. Tagge jumped at Harry, only to be banished back into the flame whip.

"_Daddy,_" the beautiful teen-aged girl said, "_don't let the anger make you a monster too. Please don't._"

"I'll try, baby girl," Harry told her with tears in his eyes.

The shades faded, though, when a real monster strode into the charred, shocked over bridge. "What is happening here?" Darth Vader demanded with the voice of doom. Thulsa Doom, to be precise.

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**Author's Note**: Once again I just wish to stress just how much I appreciate Teufel1987, JR and Miles for beta reading yet another of my stories. As always, they make everything better.


	6. The Voice of Doom

A/N: I realize for whatever reason my review responses to Chap 4 never posted. I barely got the chapter posted before FFN started to get spammed again. My apologies. Chap 5 review responses should be in the forum.

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><p><strong><span>Chapter Six: The Voice of Doom<span>**

[_Note: Since my betas didn't get the reference, there's a good chance many of you won't either. Several of the characters in this chapter are derived from the novel Death Star by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry. This is the last section that bears any resemblance to Lord of Light Dark, but only because I reference the same source material in both.]_

The fire whip around them flared as a massive wind struck and then blew it out entirely. Harry blinked in surprise at the demonstration of power—the first he'd seen since he arrived in the larger galaxy. Darth Vader dropped his hand and strode toward Harry and the Princess.

"And so the magician shows his power at last," the dark figure said. The word 'magician' dripped with contempt. "The Emperor considered killing you many times, but he was curious how you managed to replace two thousand clones with your pitiful slaves."

"I told them your mother was offering group rates, so they all went running," Harry snapped back.

Leia turned and stared at Harry, incredulous, while Darth Vader missed a step. "What did you say?"

"I called your mother a whore," Harry said. "Which makes you the son of a whore." _Sotto voce_, he said to Leia, "_Prepare to run._"

"You have spelled your own death, arrogant fool," Vader snarled. He grabbed a cylinder from his belt and from its end came a scintillating beam of red energy. Suddenly Vader launched himself into the air like a missile.

"Run!" Harry cried to Leia before trying to capture Vader in a levitation charm. Strangely, his magic had difficulty finding purchase around the dark lord, as if he were shielding somehow. Realizing he had not diverted the man's course sufficiently, Harry had no choice but to _Apparate_. He appeared next to Leia just outside the still open turbolift.

"Right, that didn't work," he muttered. Ahead of them, Vader somehow landed on his feet and spun about to attack again. Summoning all of his magic, Harry stomped a foot down, screamed, and unleashed the darkest, most destructive magic he knew. Flame in the shape of a dragon exploded from his hands and roared with all the fires of hell.

The effort exhausted him as dark magic always did. As the over bridge erupted in living magical fire, he stumbled backward into the turbolift and would have fallen had Leia not caught him. In a second the door closed and the lift began to drop. "Well, you're certainly brave," she said dryly. "Stupid, but brave."

"And you're short," Harry said. "The hair is growing on me, though."

Leia shook her head, and then suddenly chuckled. It was a tired, exasperated sound. "You are so strange. Was that…was that your family?"

"Yes."

"How did you make them appear?"

"I can summon the souls of the dead."

She shivered. "That sounds like a Sith power."

"It's not. I gained the power of death to defeat a dark lord when I was a teenager." The turbolift suddenly came a stop. "Holiday's over, looks like ... Help me up?"

With a put-upon sigh, she stood and then helped him to his feet once again. He had them cloaked in invisibility just as the doors opened and Stormtroopers rushed in. With a line of sight behind the troopers, Harry was able to Apparate them down the hall.

"Where are we?" he whispered.

Leia looked around even as she kept a firm grip around his waist. "No idea. It doesn't matter, just shut up and walk."

"You're bossy for such a short woman," Harry noted.

"I'm the Princess of Alderaan. Deal with it." He looked down and saw fresh, ragged pain cross her expression at the mention of her home before it morphed once more into the strong-willed young woman who withstood days of torture. For a moment, he regretted being able to see her under the cloak.

They walked, still cloaked in invisibility, as Stormtroopers rushed to and fro. "I can't believe we're doing this," Leia said.

"I can't either," Harry admitted. "We need to find a place to rest and recuperate."

"I saw a sign a few halls back that was advertising a cantina. We're not that far."

"Right."

The two made their way through the corridors, with Harry flagging more and more as they went. "What's wrong?"

"I haven't eaten in three days," Harry said. "Not since you arrived. And I've used a hell of a lot of magic. I'm exhausted magically and physically."

"Can you keep us invisible?"

"The invisibility is separate from my magic," Harry said. "We're almost there—I can smell food."

The cantina was dimly lit and quiet. With Harry's destruction on the over bridge, the entire station was likely on alert, which would explain why the cantina was empty. The two snuck in and took seats at the bar. A blue-skinned woman with tentacles instead of hair stepped behind the bar from a kitchen/store room and looked around. "Rodo, did you see anyone come in?"

From the kitchen behind her emerged a hulking, monstrous figure of a man, easily two feet taller than Harry and twice his width. "Nah," he said in a deceptively soft voice.

Touching on his weakening magic, Harry reached out and scanned the woman's mind briefly. What he saw in her mind gave him hope, and despite the obvious risks, he let the invisibility cloak drop to expose both he and Leia.

The huge man moved with frightening speed as he turned to face the threat and protect his employer. The blue skin woman just stared. "What the hell?"

"We need food," Harry told her honestly. "Both of us. She's been tortured for three days, and a couple of hours ago they made her watch her world die."

Leia had a deer-in-the-headlights look, surprised that Harry exposed them. The blue-skinned woman stared hard at Leia, and a second later her eyes widened. "You're the prisoner Dr. Divini told me about. You're the Senator from Alderaan!"

This time Harry turned to Leia and blinked. "Senator? You're like twelve. Who elects a senator who doesn't even have all her teeth in yet?"

Rodo snorted. Leia glared back. "I'll have you know that I _am_ a senator, and have served for two years. And don't tell me I'm young, you barely look old enough to be in here!"

"Don't let my face fool you. You saw I had a son older than you are," Harry pointed out. "I mean, he _was_ older."

Evidently the exchange was enough for the blue-skinned woman. "Rodo, why don't we close up shop for now? You two, stay put, I'll get you something to eat."

Harry said nothing as the huge, soft-voiced man went to close up the cantina. Beside him, Leia said softly, "I'm sorry about your family."

When he looked at her, he no longer saw the strong, determined senator. He saw a scared, heart-broken young woman. "I'm sorry for your family too," he said. "What are you going to do after we're out of this place?"

"I have friends who are fighting against the Empire," Leia said. "The Alliance to Restore the Republic formed when we realized that the Empire would never restore dignity or peace to the galaxy." As she went on to describe the rebel alliance, Harry saw a new strength fill her—the strength that came from pure conviction. It was this strength, he realized, that saw her through her torture.

Until Alderaan, of course.

The blue girl walked back to the bar carrying two large platters of steaming food. Harry's stomach cramped painfully at the smell of it. He took a few hesitant bites, not because he wasn't hungry, but because he was afraid of what his stomach would do after so long without food. "Why aren't you eating?' the bartender asked.

"It's been three days since I ate, I have to be careful what I put down," Harry said.

Comprehension dawned, and the woman left only to return moments later with a large, steaming cup of soup. It was heavy enough to be filling, but light enough not to make Harry sick. "Thank you!" he breathed as he started to sip the soup directly from the bowl.

"My name is Memah Roothes, and this is my friend Rodo. Can I ask how you escaped?"

Leia nodded to the slurping Harry. "He did it. I'm not sure how, but he has abilities not even the Jedi have. Vader called him a magician."

"Vader?" Roothes asked. "Words spreading all over the station—he was hurt somehow. Tarkin is dead, and Vader is on a shuttle headed for Imperial Centre due to his injuries.

Harry let the bowl fall and stared at her. "Vader's alive?" he asked, astounded. "How can that be? I pumped enough Fiendfyre into that bridge to eat half the station. It's magical, sentient fire. It can burn anything, even diamond!"

"Wait…, that was you?" Memah asked.

"Yeah. Least I got Tarkin."

A sudden wave of lethargy hit Harry as his body began to desperately absorb the nutrients in the soup. He fought it off with just a yawn. "So, any ideas how to get off this station?"

"Right now, the whole place is crazy," Memah said. "One of our regulars is a marine, and last I heard no one knew for sure who was even in command since most of the executive staff was in the over bridge. Supposedly the Emperor has dispatched a grand admiral to the station, but it'll be days before he arrives."

"Sounds like the best time to escape," Leia said.

Rodo shook his head. "The station has massive tractor beams. The one thing everyone has agreed to is that the station is on total lock-down. The only way you could escape is if you disabled the tractor beams."

"And how do we do that?" Leia asked.

"I don't know," Memah admitted. "I'm not allowed access to any sensitive areas of the station."

"Stihl is," Rodo said.

"Who?"

"Nova Stihl," Rodo said. "He's the marine Memah mentioned. Teaches _Teras Kasi_ for new recruits and anyone else who wants to come. Good man, and he almost fainted when Alderaan blew. Says he could feel it. I think he'd help."

Harry admired how decisive Leia was. Having taken the measure of the two, Leia trusted them without hesitation. "If you think he could help, we would appreciate it."

Harry, having absorbed the soup without consequence, began nibbling on the heavier food Memah provided. Leia did the same, perhaps realizing how important keeping her energy up would be. They were just finished when Rodo walked quickly to the accordion folding metal wall that they used to close up the cantina. He opened it partially to allow a single armed marine through. The man did not wear Stormtrooper armour, but rather the black uniforms and large, oddly shaped helmets both had seen occasionally.

"It really is you," he said to the Princess.

"Yes," Leia said, slipping into yet another role—that of the Princess Royal of a lost planet. "We need to get off the station, but I understand the tractor beams have to be disabled first."

"Not to mention we need a ship," Harry added.

Stihl rubbed his chin. "I can get you to the tractor beams, I suppose. We'll have to disguise you somehow."

"We can turn invisible, that won't be a problem," Harry said.

Rather than argue, Nova merely shrugged. "That'll help. As for a ship—you know, it's the strangest thing, but we caught a freighter not an hour ago trying to enter Alderaan. All the escape pods were jettisoned, so it's up for grabs. And since no one's really in charge, it's just kind of sitting in Bay 327. It's an ugly ship, but with no tractor beams it might serve."

Leia stood, and was dwarfed before the marine. "Thank you, Sergeant. I have to ask…why are you helping us?"

"Just a feeling, like you're important," he said with a blush. "Plus, I don't ever want to feel anything like what I felt when they blew up Despayre and Alderaan. It felt like my head was going to explode."

"If we're going to go, sooner would be better," Harry said. To Memah, he said, "Thank you. Words aren't enough, but it's all I have. Thank you."

"You're welcome," she said.

Harry turned to Rodo, who nodded but said nothing, and finally to Stihl. "Leia, are you ready?"

She walked back to Harry's side, wrapped an arm around his waist, and the two disappeared. "Neat trick," Stihl said. "I'm going to walk quickly so I look like I'm on a mission. Try to keep up."

"We will," said Harry's disembodied voice.

The marine seemed to know exactly where he was going, and in the midst of all the scrambling, confused and even terrified Imperials, he strode with purpose and confidence. The hardest part of following was avoiding all the others running around the halls of the station.

Even with turbolifts, it took easily thirty minutes to reach the tractor beams. Though many other posts were abandoned, there were four Stormtroopers guarding the tractor beams—two on either door leading to the long tube that seemed to drop into the core of the station.

So that Sergeant Stihl would not be forced to fire on his own people, Harry let go of Leia, stunned the two nearest, and then Apparated to the far side of the room and did the same, before Apparating back to Leia.

"What the stars was that?" Stihl demanded, wide-eyed.

"Magic," Harry said shortly. "Any idea how to actually deactivate the tractor beams?"

"No idea," Stihl admitted. "I'm not a tech, I'm just a grunt. Wait, we're not alone!"

"Peace, friend," a voice said from nowhere. Harry blinked in surprise as an old man in dusty brown robes appeared from the shadows of one corner. It didn't seem to be disillusionment so much as a very strong notice-me-not charm.

"General Kenobi?" Leia positively beamed. "Is it really you?"

"Yes, child. You must be Leia." The old man stepped to the princess, took her shoulders and held her at a distance. "How you've grown! More like your mother every day."

"So her mum was short too?" Harry asked, curious.

"Quite," Kenobi said with a dry smile. "I am Obi-Wan Kenobi. Who might you be?"

"Harry Potter."

"I've not heard of you before today, I'm afraid," the old man said. "But on this day, your name has become quite a common utterance."

"I've heard of you," the marine, Stihl, said to Kenobi. "You're a Jedi."

"_Was_," Kenobi said. "I must confess, when we were captured, I rather strongly thought I was going to meet my end at the hands of a former pupil of mine. Imagine my surprise when he was injured by someone else and evacuated off the station." He looked squarely at Harry as he spoke.

"Yeah, sorry about that," Harry said. "I was fairly certain I'd killed him."

"Do not underestimate Darth Vader," Obi-Wan said. He turned to Stihl. "The Force is with you, young man. May I ask why you are helping the princess?"

"It was the right thing to do."

Obi-Wan nodded. "Then let me ask you another question. If I were to invite you to join us, would you?"

The marine scratched his chin again, and finally shook his head. "No, not now. I have friends on this station who also want to get out, and we're working on it. If we tried to go with you, someone would figure it out, and I don't think we'd all make it."

"Fair enough," Obi-Wan said. "May the Force be with you, my friend."

When Stihl was gone, Obi-Wan said, "Princess, we have the information you sent. We do need to leave now, while I have the tractor beams off."

"Hey, quick question, what would happen if that control tower there blew up?" Harry asked.

"The tractor beams for our sector of the station would be out of commission until they fixed it," Obi-Wan said.

"Good." Harry concentrated on the tower and began transfiguring the metal skin to pure TNT. He only knew the spell because he'd read of an Italian Unspeakable who developed it to help build an underground extension of the Italian Ministry.

"My goodness," Obi-Wan whispered. "You're changing the material itself. How are you doing that?"

"Magic," Harry said. "This is going to be loud." With the skin of the control tower now composed of pure, highly unstable explosive, Harry raised his hand and fired a blasting spell at it. The resulting explosion removed the entire structure and caused the floor under their feet to shake violently.

"Ouch," Harry muttered. "Remind me to cover my ears next time."

"That will attract attention," the Jedi said. "We need to be quick. I left the pilot and a young friend there with the ship. I hope they have not fallen into any trouble."

Given Kenobi's own power, Harry opted for a Notice-Me-Not charm on himself and the princess as well. The three moved hurriedly through the halls of the station, completely unnoticed by the thousands of marines and Stormtroopers who were looking for them. Finally, they reached the control room for the bay Kenobi landed in, only to find two droids and two stripped Stormtroopers. Harry noticed these men were not clones, and were significantly younger than those on Despayre.

"R2-D2, you're safe!" Leia said as she rushed to the squat, domed droid.

"Threepio, where are Luke and Captain Solo?" Kenobi said.

"Oh, I'm afraid that they are attempting to rescue the princess," the golden droid said in a prissy, effeminate voice that immediately reminded Harry of Percy Weasley. "They and the Wookiee are in the detention Centre pinned down by heavy fire. I'm afraid Captain Solo has been hurt."

Harry looked at Kenobi. "Do we really need these people?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Fine." Harry disappeared and reappeared a heartbeat later in the middle of a firefight. He shielded himself and squatted down behind one of the doors to the cells. Just ahead he saw a tow-headed boy Leia's age wearing Stormtrooper armour without a helmet. He was firing with decent accuracy. At his feet, flushed and firing with his left hand, was a brown-headed man in his early thirties. And behind him was a Wookiee, firing a crossbow that shot green bolts of energy.

At the end of the one-way hall Harry could see dozens of Stormtroopers and marines all firing in at the hopelessly outgunned men.

"Bloody hell," Harry muttered. Though his magic was still weak, he conjured a stream of water that shot down the hall and soaked all the enemy forces. He followed it up with a bolt of lightning that put every soldier in the command pit on his back.

"Who're you?" the tow-headed boy demanded as he swung his blaster around.

"I'm the one who's going to save your arse," Harry muttered. "Wookiee, gather your friend, please. Kenobi is waiting for us."

The Wookiee said, "_I do not take orders from cubs."_

"I'm older than I look," Harry snapped back. "If you don't pick him up, we'll leave him behind."

Surprised that Harry could understand him, the Wookiee did as instructed and picked up the red-faced, swearing man. "Alright, gather close," Harry said. "This is really going to suck."

As weak as he was, a four-person apparition made for a rough trip. When they landed, the Wookiee roared his disapproval, the injured man cursed up a storm, and the boy puked all over the floor.

"That's it for me," Harry said a second before his knees buckled and dumped him on the floor. "I'm tapped out again."

"I hope this doesn't become a habit," Leia said as she helped him back to his feet.

With the Wookiee still carrying his friend, the small party ran down the empty corridor to the bay that held the ship. "You came in that?" Leia asked. "My father said you were brave, General, but he never said you were suicidal."

"That's my ship, sweetheart," the man in the Wookiee's arms said.

"Exactly," Leia said.

The ship looked rather like a lop-sided Frisbee with horns and a cancerous protrusion on one side. Still, everyone seemed to think it could fly, so Harry ran with the rest to get on. "Yes, I can fly, Chewie," the captain said. "Just get me to the cockpit."

Harry followed them through a narrow corridor into the protrusion. "Sure hope you got those tractor beams off, or this is going to be a short trip," the captain said.

Kenobi looked over to Harry, who shrugged before slumping into one of the two spare seats. The ship hummed to life and then soared out of the bay door into open space. "Hey, no tractor beam!" the captain said happily. "And…uh-oh."

"Uh-oh what?" Harry said.

"Yeah, there's like four hundred TIE fighters bearing down on us," Han said. "Chewie, punch it. We can't fight those odds. I'll start working on a hyperspace jump."

Kenobi leaned over to Harry. "Is there anything you can do, my friend?"

The ship around them bucked heavily under a blow of enemy fire. "I'm not sure I have anything left," Harry admitted.

"Perhaps I can help you," the Jedi said.

"Yeah, sure, why not?"

"Come, we need space.'

Harry tiredly followed the old Jedi out of the cockpit. They found Luke and the Princess speaking in the main crew area. "What's happening?" Leia asked.

"We're going to try something," Harry said.

At Kenobi's direction, Harry pulled a chair away from a round chess board and sat. "Luke, you should observe this," Kenobi said. Then, a moment of consideration later, he added, "And perhaps you as well, Princess."

"You're not going to hypnotize me and make me dance naked on the table, are you?" Harry asked.

"I'd not planned on it," Obi-Wan said, again with that dry smile. He reminded Harry of a slightly more subdued Dumbledore. "Instead, I am going to give you energy from the Force."

Harry let the old man touch his head, and almost instantly he felt…_something_. It wasn't magic, per se, but it was powerful. Energy filled his limbs until he felt as if he were tingling. And then, as if percolating through heavy filters, he felt the energy seep into his nearly depleted magical core.

"Wow," he whispered. Now that he knew what to expect, he pulled at the energy desperately, and it came like water flowing down a mountain, filling him up just as fast as he could pull it, until his magical core was nearly filled to capacity. When he opened his eyes, he was surprised to see that Obi-Wan had backed off and simply watched with a knowing smile.

"Okay, listen. The charm I can use needs a secret keeper outside the ship itself. We can switch the secret-keeper after easily. So stay put a moment, okay?"

Harry cast a body-wide Bubblehead and warming charms on himself and then Apparated outside the ship in the midst of a raging battle. Even so, with fighters darting all around firing at the rapidly retreating ship, he managed to cast the _Fidelius_ charm using himself as the secret-keeper. It took almost five minutes, and by the end of it his other charms had left him gasping and freezing. Even so, he Apparated the thousands of miles the ship had travelled in that five minutes and reappeared in the same spot he left shivering with bone-deep cold.

A speaker beeped, followed a moment later by Captain Solo's voice. "What the hell did you do? All the TIEs just turned around and disappeared."

Harry grinned at Kenobi despite his shivering. "It's an old spell to hide things. This ship can only be seen by those who know it exists. To everyone else, it's not only invisible, it doesn't exist at all."

"Excellent work, young Harry. Welcome to the larger world of the Force, for though I may have opened your mind to it, it was your own power which utilized it."

"General Kenobi?" the princess said. Her voice was as uncertain as anything Harry had ever heard. "Why do I feel like I could fly?"

"Drugs?" Harry hazarded a guess.

Luke snickered, but Ben shook his head. "Because, my dear child, I have opened your mind to the Force as well."

* * *

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**Author's Note**: Once again I just wish to stress just how much I appreciate Teufel1987, JR and Miles for beta reading yet another of my stories. As always, they make everything better.


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